The Balkan Trilogy (51 page)

‘Byron,’ said Guy.

‘Oh, crumbs!’ Toby clapped a hand over his eyes in exaggerated shame. ‘I’m always doing it. It’s not that I don’t know: I don’t remember.’ He suddenly noticed Yakimov and crying: ‘Hello, hello, hello,’ he rushed forward with outstretched hand.

Harriet went into the kitchen to tell Despina there would be a guest for luncheon. When she returned, Toby, with many irrelevant guffaws, was describing the situation in the Transylvanian capital from which he had evacuated himself.

Although Cluj had been under Rumanian rule for twenty years, it was still a Hungarian city. The citizens only waited for the despised regime to end.

‘It’s not that they’re pro-German,’ he said, ‘they just want the Hunks back. They shut their eyes to the fact that when the Hunks come the Huns’ll follow. If you point it out, they make excuses. A woman I know, a Jewess, said: “We don’t want it for ourselves, we want it for our children.” They think it’ll happen any day now.’

Toby was standing by the open French window, the dazzle of out-of-doors limning his ragged outline. ‘I can tell you,’ he said, ‘the only Englishman among that lot, I had to keep my wits about me. And what do you think happened before I left? The Germans installed a Gauleiter – a Count Frederich von Flügel. “Get out while the going’s good,” I told myself.’

‘Freddi von Flügel!’ Yakimov broke in in delighted surprise. ‘Why, he’s an old friend of mine. A dear old friend.’ He looked
happily about him. ‘When I get the Hispano, we might all drive to Cluj and see Freddi. I’m sure he’d do us proud.’

Toby gazed open-mouthed at Yakimov, then his shoulders shook as though giving some farcical imitation of laughter. ‘You’re a joker,’ he said and Yakimov, though surprised, seemed gratified to be thought one.

While they were eating, Harriet asked Toby: ‘Will you remain in Bucharest?’

‘If I can get some teaching,’ he said. ‘I’m a free-lancer, no organisation behind me. Came out on my own, drove the old bus all the way. Bit of an adventure. The fact is, if I don’t work, I don’t eat. Simple as that.’ He gazed at Guy, supplicant and inquiring. ‘Hearing you were short-staffed, I turned up on the doorstep.’

The question of his employment had obviously been raised already, for Guy merely nodded and said: ‘I must see what Inchcape says before taking anyone on.’

Harriet looked again at Toby, considering him not so much as a teacher as a possible help in time of trouble. She had noticed his heavy brogues. He was wearing grey flannel trousers bagged at the knees and a sagging tweed jacket, much patched with leather. It was the uniform of most young English civilians and yet on him it looked like a disguise. ‘The man’s man!’ The last time he had arrived in Bucharest, during one of the usual invasion scares, he had fled from Cluj in a panic: but she was less inclined to condemn panic since she had experienced it herself. How would he react to a sudden Guardist attack? All this pipe-sucking masculinity, this casual costume, would surely require him, when the time came, to prove himself ‘a good man in a tight corner’. She looked at Guy, who was saying: ‘If Inchcape agrees, I might be able to give you twenty hours a week. That should keep you going.’

Toby ducked his head gratefully, then asked: ‘What about lectures?’

‘I would only need you to teach.’

‘I used to lecture at Cluj – Mod. Eng. Lit. I must say, I enjoy giving the odd lecture.’ Toby, from behind his hair and
moustache, gazed at Guy like an old sheepdog confident he would be put to use. Harriet felt sorry for him. He probably imagined, as others had done before him, that Guy was easily persuadable. The truth was, that in authority Guy could be inflexible. Even if he needed a lecturer, he would not choose one who mistook Byron for Tennyson.

‘The other day,’ Yakimov suddenly spoke, slowly and sadly, out of his absorption in his food, ‘I was thinking, strange as it must seem, I haven’t seen a banana for about a year.’ He sighed at the thought.

The Pringles had grown too used to him to react to his chance observations, but Toby rocked about, laughing as though Yakimov’s speech had been one of hilarious impropriety.

Yakimov modestly explained: ‘Used to be very fond of bananas.’

When luncheon was over and Yakimov had retired to his room Harriet looked for Toby’s departure, but when he eventually made a move Guy detained him saying: ‘Stay to tea. On my way back to the University, I’ll take you to the Bureau to meet Inchcape.’

Harriet went into the bedroom. Determined to incite him to act while the power to incite was in her, she called Guy in, shut the door of the sitting-room and said: ‘You must speak to Yakimov. You must tell him to go.’

Mystified by the urgency of her manner and unwilling to obey, he said: ‘All right, but not now.’

‘Yes,
now
.’ She stood between him and the door. ‘Go in and see him. It’s too risky having him here with Sasha around. He must go.’

‘Well, if you say so.’ Guy’s agreement was tentative, a playing for time. He paused, then said: ‘It would be better if you spoke to him.’

‘You brought him here, you must get rid of him.’

‘It’s a difficult situation. I was glad to have him here while he was rehearsing. He worked hard and helped to make the show a success. In a way, I owe him something. I can’t just
tell him to go now the show’s over, but it’s different for you. You can be firm with him.’

‘What you mean is, if there’s anything unpleasant to be done, you prefer that I should do it?’

Cornered, he reacted with rare exasperation: ‘Look here, darling, I have other things to worry about. Sasha is up on the roof. Yakimov’s not likely to see him and probably wouldn’t be interested if he did see him. So why worry? Now I must go back and talk to Toby.’

She let him go, knowing nothing more would be gained by talk. And she realised it would always be the same. If action had to be taken, she would have to be the one to take it. That was the price to be paid for a relationship that gave her more freedom than she had bargained for. Freedom; after all, was not a basic concept of marriage. As for Guy, he did not want a private life: he chose to live publicly. She said to herself: ‘He’s crassly selfish’ – an accusation that would have astounded his admirers.

She went over to the window and leant out. Looking down the drop of nine floors to the cobbles below, she thought of the kitten that had fallen from the balcony five months before. The scene dissolved into a marbling of blue and gold as her eyes filled with tears, and she suffered again the outrageous grief with which she had learnt of the kitten’s death. It had been her kitten. It had acknowledged her. It did not bite her. She was the only one who had no fear of it. Possessed by memory of the little red-golden flame of a cat that for a few weeks had hurtled itself, a ball of fur and claws, about the flat, she wept: ‘My kitten. My poor kitten,’ feeling she had loved it as she could never love anything or anybody. Guy, after all, did not permit himself to be loved in this way.

She did not return to the room until she heard Despina taking in the tea things. Toby was saying: ‘But someone’s certain to march in here sooner or later. I suppose the Legation’ll give us proper warning?’

Guy did not know and did not seem much to care. He said:
‘The important thing is not to panic. We must keep the school going.’

Toby ducked his head in vehement agreement. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘one must keep the old weather eye open.’

Yakimov had appeared for tea in his tattered brocade dressing-gown and when Guy and Toby went off to see Inchcape there he still was, his apprehensions forgotten, comfortably eating his way through the cakes and sandwiches that were left. Well, here was her opportunity to say: ‘You have been living on top of us since Easter. I’ve had enough of you. Please pack your bags and go.’ At which Yakimov, with his most pitiful expression, would ask: ‘But where can poor Yaki go?’ There had been no answer to that question four months before, and there was no answer now. He had exhausted his credit in Bucharest. No one would take him in. If she wanted to get rid of him, she would have to pack his bags herself and lock him out. And if she did that, he would probably sit on the doorstep until Guy brought him back in again.

When he had emptied the plates he stretched and sighed: ‘Think I’ll take a bath.’ He went, and she had still said nothing. Knowing herself no more capable than Guy of throwing Yakimov out, she had thought of a different move. She would go and see Sasha. The boy probably imagined that they, like the diplomats, were outside Rumanian law. She could explain to him that by sheltering him Guy ran the same risk as anyone else. Then what would Sasha do?

The problem of their responsibility lay between desperation and desperation. The only loophole was the possibility that Sasha could think of a friend who might shelter him, perhaps a Jewish school-friend. Or there was his stepmother, who was claiming maintenance from the Drucker fortune. Somebody surely would take him in.

She went out to the kitchen. Despina was on the fire-escape, bawling down to other servants who had a free hour or so before it was time to prepare dinner. Feeling anomalous in these regions, Harriet slipped past her and started to ascend
the iron ladder, but Despina missed nothing. ‘That’s right,’ she called out. ‘Visit the poor boy. He’s lonely up there.’

Despina had adopted Sasha. Although Despina had been told that he must not come into the flat, Harriet had several times heard them laughing together in the kitchen. Despina scoffed at her fears, saying she could pass the boy off to anyone as her relative. Sasha was settling into a routine of life here and would soon, if undisturbed, become, like Yakimov, an unmovable part of the household.

The roof, high above its neighbours, was in the full light of the lowering sun. The sun was still very warm. Heat not only poured down on to the concrete but rose from it.

A row of wooden huts, like bathing-boxes, stood against the northern parapet, numbered one for each flat. Harriet, as she reached the roof-level, could see Sasha sitting outside his hut, holding a piece of stick which he had been throwing for a dog. The dog, a rough, white mongrel, apparently lived up here.

As soon as he saw her, Sasha got to his feet while the dog remained expectant, swaying a tail like a dirty feather.

She explained her visit by saying: ‘How are you managing up here? Is Despina looking after you?’

‘Oh, yes.’ He was eagerly reassuring, adding thanks for all that was done for him. The fact of his presence being a danger to them seemed not to have occurred to him.

While he talked she looked beyond him through the open door of the hut where he was living. The hut had no window and was ventilated by a hole in the door. On the floor was a straw pallet that Despina must have borrowed for him, a blanket, some books Guy had brought up and a stub of candle.

Before she left England she would have believed it impossible for a human being to survive through the freezing winter, the torrid summer, in a cell like this. She had discovered in Rumania that there were millions to whom such shelter would be luxury. She took a step towards it but, repelled by the interior smell and heat, came to a stop saying: ‘It’s very small.’

Sasha smiled as though it were his place to apologise. He
had been here only a few days but he was already putting on weight. When she had seen him on the night of his reappearance, she had been repelled by his abject squalor. Now, clean, wearing a shirt and trousers Guy had given him, the edge of fear gone from his face, his hair beginning to show like a shadow over his head, he was already the boy she had first met in the Drucker flat.

He was rather an ugly boy with his long nose, close-set eyes and long drooping body, but there was an appeal about his extreme gentleness of manner, which on their first meeting had made her think of some nervous animal grown meek in captivity. Because of this, he seemed completely familiar to her.

Feeling no restraint with him, she put out her hand and said: ‘Let us sit on the wall,’ and jumping up, she settled herself on the low parapet that surrounded the roof. From here she could see almost the whole extent of the city, the roofs gleaming through a heat-mist that was beginning to grow dense and golden with evening. Sasha came and leant against the wall beside her. She asked him what he passed for among the servants who slept in the other huts.

He said: ‘Despina says I come from her village.’

He looked nothing like a peasant, but he might be the son of some Jewish tallyman. Anyway, no one, it seemed, took much notice of him. Despina said the kitchen quarters of Bucharest harboured thousands of deserters.

‘How long had you been in Bucharest when we met you?’ she asked.

‘Two nights.’ He told her that he had separated from his company in Czernowitz and stowed away in a freight train that brought him to the capital. On the night of his arrival, he had slept under a market stall near the station, but had been turned out soon after midnight by some beggars whose usual sleeping place it was. The next night he had tried to sleep in the park, but there had been one of the usual spy scares on. The police, in their zeal, had tramped about all night, forcing him repeatedly to move his position.

He had not known what had happened to his family. When in Bessarabia, he had written to his aunts but received no reply. When he reached Bucharest, he had looked up at the windows of the family flat and seeing the curtains changed, realised the Druckers were not there. In the streets he had caught sight of people he knew, but in his fear of re-arrest dared approach no one until he saw Guy.

While he talked, he glanced shyly aside at her, smiling, all the misery gone from his gaze.

She said: ‘You know that your family have left Rumania?’

‘Guy told me.’ If he knew they had taken flight immediately, without a backward glance for him or his father, he did not seem much concerned.

She decided the time had come to mention the possibility of his finding another shelter. She said: ‘Your stepmother is still here, of course. Don’t you think she could help you? She might be willing to let you live with her.’

He whispered: ‘Oh, no,’ startled and horrified by the suggestion.