The Balkan Trilogy (38 page)

Mrs. Ramsden whispered to Harriet: ‘The pension’s only good here, of course. She won’t have a penny if we have to skedaddle.’

Having listened for a week to the conversation of these women, Harriet knew that what they dreaded most was the disintegration of their adopted world. Everything they had was here. Such relatives as remained to them in England had forgotten them. If they were driven out of Rumania, they would find themselves without friends, homes, status or money.

‘I haven’t got a pension,’ said Mrs Ramsden, ‘but I’ve got me savings. All invested here. I’ll stay here. Whatever happens, I’ll take me chance.’ A stout woman, noted for her enormous
feathered hats, she was the most lively of the three. She had come to Bucharest when widowed, after the First World War. She had never gone home again. She frequently told the table: ‘I’m sixty-nine. You’d never believe it, but I am.’

Now she said: ‘When Woolley packed us all off last September, I was that home-sick, I cried my eyes out every night. Istanbul is a dirty hole. I’d never trust meself there again. Might end up in one of them hair-eems.’ She brought her hand down heavily on the knee of Miss Truslove and suddenly shouted: ‘Whoops!’

Miss Truslove was looking disturbed. In her mournful little voice, she said: ‘I wouldn’t care to stay on here, not with a lot of Germans about.’

‘Oh,’ said Mrs Ramsden, ‘you never know your luck.’

Galpin had at first seemed resentful of Mrs. Ramsden and her vitality. When she first settled herself at the table, her hat shifting and shaking as though barely anchored on her head, her blouse of shot-silk creaking as though about to split, he asked discouragingly: ‘No private pupils this afternoon, Mrs Ramsden?’ She answered briskly: ‘Not one. English is out these days. Everyone’s learning German.’

Now he turned on her with scorn: ‘You don’t imagine you can stay here under a German occupation, do you? Any English national fool enough to try it would find himself in Belsen double quick.’

At this Miss Truslove started sniffing, but as she searched for her handkerchief, she was distracted, as was Galpin, by the appearance of the Polish girl, Wanda.

Wanda had broken with Galpin. She had lately been seen driving with Foxy Leverett in his de Dion Bouton. People, surprised at this sight, sought to explain it away. Foxy, still a frequent companion of Princess Teodorescu, had, they said, been ordered to associate with Wanda and try to persuade her to moderate the irresponsible nonsense she was sending to her paper as news. Whatever their relationship, she had been much alone since Foxy had had to give his time to the play. Now here she was, turning up in the garden, like the rest of them.

‘I’ll be damned!’ said Galpin, his eyes staring out at Wanda so that the whole of the chocolate-brown pupil could be seen, merging at top and bottom into the bloodshot yellow of the sclerotic.

She had made something of an entry in a tight black dress and shoes with very high heels. Her bare back and arms were already burnt brown. Ignoring Galpin, she greeted Screwby. ‘Any news?’ she asked. There was none.

The women, recognising in her the same tense consciousness of peril that united them all, moved round to make room for her. She sat, leaning forward over the table, her brow in her hand, her lank hair falling about her, and stared at Screwby. She was a silent girl, whose habit it was to fix in this way any man who interested her. She asked: ‘What is going to happen? What are we going to do?’ as though Screwby had but to open his lips and their dilemma would be solved.

Screwby made no attempt to play the rôle allotted him. He grinned his ignorance. Galpin began to talk rather excitedly, trying to give the impression that Wanda’s entry had interrupted one of his stories. He started half-way through a story Harriet had heard from him several times – how, when a newspaper-man in Albania, he had attempted to break into the summer palace and interview the Queen, who had been newly delivered of a child.

‘I wasn’t going to be kept out by that ridiculous little toy army round the gates,’ he said.

‘And did you see her?’ Mrs Ramsden played up to him.

‘No. They threw me out three times. Me – who’d gone round Sussex collecting two pints of mother’s milk a day for the Ickleford quads.’

Wanda’s silent presence made Galpin’s talk more aggressive and grotesque. As he talked, he watched her, his eyes standing from his head like aniseed balls. She ignored him for an hour, then rose and went. He stared after her glumly. ‘Poor thing,’ he said. ‘I feel sorry for her. Really I do! She hasn’t a friend in the place.’

They stayed on in the garden until the evening, when the scent of lime was strongest. Galpin had his portable wireless-set and repeatedly tried to get the promised report of Churchill’s speech. The bats were darting about overhead. Mrs Ramsden bent down, frightened for her hat.

‘They have to be cut out if they get in,’ she said, adding: ‘But it’s not just
them
: it’s what they leave behind.’

The trees grew dark beneath a sky sheened like a silver plate. Unlike most other café gardens, the hotel garden was not illuminated. The only light came from the hotel windows. The possibilities of the garden had never been exploited. Grass grew in tufts from the pebbled floor. No one bothered to brush from the tables the withering lime-flowers. Except for a few clandestine Rumanian couples who sat where they would be least observed, the English usually had the place to themselves.

At last the speech began. The Rumanian couples rose out of the shadows and moved silently forward to hear Churchill promise that England would never surrender. ‘We shall fight on the beaches,’ he said. ‘We shall fight in the fields.’

Mrs Ramsden bowed her face down into her hands. Her hat fell off and rolled unnoticed under the table.

Each day the crowd round the German Bureau window saw the broad arrows of the German advance stretch farther into France. One crossed the Somme and veered south towards Paris. The spectators said that surely, some time soon, there must be a stop. No one could contemplate the loss of Paris.

Harriet passed the window on her way to Bella’s flat. She need not have gone up the Calea Victoriei or, going that way, she could have kept to the other pavement. Instead she brushed through the crowd, giving the arrows a glance which was meant to be indifferent, and went on with her head in the air.

Bella, as Harriet entered her drawing-room, cried: ‘What do you think?’ giving Harriet, for a second, a pang of hope, but Bella’s excitement was merely a state of mind produced by her success as Helen. All she had to say was: ‘They’ve still
got that portrait of Chamberlain hanging up at the club. Him and his flower Safety. I called in the servants and ordered them to take it down at once. I made them put it face to the wall in the toilet.’

The dressmaker was delivering the women’s costumes, and Bella had insisted that Harriet come to see the final fitting.

The dress, made from cheap white voile from which peasant women made their blouses, was of classical simplicity. Bella had been displeased to find all the female characters were to dress alike. She wanted to have her own costume made, contemplating something rather fine in slipper satin. Now, having to put on the voile dress, she thrust out her lower lip and walked to and fro before the glass of her gigantic wardrobe, giving petulant little tugs at the bodice and skirt.

The dressmaker, on her knees, sat back on her heels and watched. She had been the cheapest Harriet could find – a tiny creature, very thin, smelling of mouldy bread. Her face, which had one cheek full and one caught-in like a deformed apple, was dark yellow and heavily moustached. She twitched nervously when Bella paused near her and, raising her hands appealingly, began to talk. Ignoring her, Bella said: ‘Well, all I can say is, we’re going to look like a lot of vestal virgins. Of course, I’ve got plenty of jewellery – but the others! I don’t know, I’m sure.’

‘Must you wear jewellery?’

‘My dear, I am Helen of Troy. I am a queen.’ She turned sideways, drew back her head and, with a stately and reflective air, observed the line of her fine bosom and her bare, round, white arm. The dress had an elegance and perfection scarcely to be found among the best English work: ‘I think we need a little colour – a square of chiffon. A big hankie, perhaps. A nice blue for me, or perhaps a gold. Other colours for the other girls.’

Bella’s face had softened, but Harriet felt depressed. She saw her designs now as stark and insipid. She felt she had spoilt the play. The dressmaker tried to speak again. Harriet asked:

‘What does she want?’

‘She wants to be paid.’

Harriet began getting out the money. Bella said: ‘She’s asking a thousand
lei
. Give her eight hundred.’

‘But a thousand is nothing. It’s barely ten shillings.’

‘She doesn’t know that. She’ll take eight hundred. A Rumanian would give her half that.’

Harriet had nothing smaller than a thousand-
lei
note. The woman accepted it with a show of bashful reluctance, but as soon as it was in her hand she bolted to the door. Bella, near the door, shut it before she could reach it, then sternly demanded the two hundred
lei
change. The woman, her face drawn, whined like a professional beggar, then began to weep. Bella held out her hand, unrelenting.

Harriet said: ‘
Bella!
She’s earned her money. We don’t want a row over a couple of bob. Let her go.’

Bella, startled by this appeal, moved from the door and the woman fled. They could hear her scrabbling with a lock, then, as she went, leaving the front door open, the click of her heels as she sped down the marble staircase.

‘Really!’ Bella grumbled in self-excuse. ‘You can’t trust them an inch. They always take advantage of foreigners. If you’d had as much to do with them as I have, you’d be just as sick of them.’

Before Harriet went, they found the dressmaker had abandoned the parcel of costumes which she was supposed to deliver to the other female players.

‘There, look at that!’ said Bella. ‘We’ll have to get a man to take it to the University.’

‘I’ll take it,’ said Harriet.

‘No, no.’ Bella held it firmly. ‘I’ll take it,’ she said, ‘I’m not ashamed to be seen carrying a parcel.’

When Clarence drove her back to the knitting factory, Harriet found the tights completed and exactly as she had ordered. On the way back he called again at the Polish store and came out with an armful of shirts and underwear. He put these on her lap. ‘For Guy,’ he said.

‘Why wouldn’t you give me these before?’

‘Because you were being so bloody-minded. Don’t you realise – if you treated me properly, you could get anything in the world you wanted from me?’

That afternoon, when Harriet sat with the others in the Athénée Palace garden, the news of the Italian declaration of war on the Allies was brought out by an Italian waiter who sometimes served them. He beamed over the English faction at the table, saying several times: ‘You are surprise, eh? You are surprise?’

Galpin replied: ‘We are not surprised. We’re only surprised there aren’t more of you hungry hyenas trying to get in on someone else’s kill.’

The waiter did not understand or, if he did, he was unaffected. He merely said: ‘Now it is we, the Italians, who will go abroad to look at picture galleries.’ He gave a flick of his cloth at the lime-flowers on the table and went off singing a snatch, laughing on a high note of triumph.

26

The dress rehearsal of
Troilus and Cressida
was to take place after the theatre closed on the night of Thursday, the 13th of June. From then until midnight on Friday the theatre and its staff were hired by the English players. Harriet was invited to this final rehearsal, which was called for eleven p.m.

Clarence, who was taking her out to supper, called for her in the early evening. He said: ‘There’s some sort of scare on. The police are stopping people and examining their papers.’

‘What are they looking for?’

‘Spies, I suppose.’

The crowds were out walking as usual in the streets. Police were moving among them in sky-blue knots of three or four. Police vans stood at the kerbs. No one seemed much alarmed. The situation was too desolating to cause excitement.

For Bucharest, the fall of France was the fall of civilisation. France was an ideal for all of those who struggled against their peasant origin. All culture, art and fashion, liberal opinion and concepts of freedom were believed to come from France. With France lost, there would be no stay or force against savagery. Except for a handful of natural fascists, no one really believed in the New Order. The truth was evident even to those who had invested in Germany: the victory of Nazi Germany would be the victory of darkness. Cut off from Western Europe, Rumania would be open to persecution, bigotry, cruelty, superstition and tyranny. There was no one to save her now.

An atmosphere of acute sadness overhung the city, something near despair. Indeed, it was despair. Harriet and Clarence
drove up to the Chaussée in what seemed the last sunset of the world.

The
gr
ǎ
din
ǎ
s
, that all winter had been a waste of snow, were alive now with lights and music. Here there was an attempt to believe that life was going on as usual. People were strolling beneath the chestnuts and limes that, in full leaf, were still unblemished by the summer heat. Harriet and Clarence left the car and joined the crowd, walking as far as the Arc de Triomphe. Around them they could hear, in several languages, expression of the bewilderment they felt themselves. People were asking one another what had happened inside France. What confusion among the French forces, what failure of spirit, had enabled an enemy to make this rapid advance? ‘It is the new Germany,’ said a woman. ‘No one can withstand it.’

Clarence laughed shortly and said: ‘Steffaneski’s gloating a bit. He said he had to hear enough about the three weeks’ war in Poland. Now we can reflect on the fact that Holland and Belgium have capitulated and the English been forced out of Europe all within eighteen days. He doesn’t give France another week.’