They Were Divided (25 page)

That had been the source of some trouble during the ball. Pityu
drank too much at the supper-table, and by the time they served the ices she had firmly turned her back on him. When the music of a csardas sounded from the ballroom upstairs and everyone started to get up, she turned back to Pityu and issued her orders.

‘You’re drunk again! Either stay here and stop drinking or go home! I don’t want to see you in the ballroom!’

With that she got up, gathering her skirt behind her, and ran up the stairs. In a few moments she had disappeared among the dancers. What could Pityu do? Nothing would induce him to stay alone in the deserted supper-room; so he went sadly to the
cloakroom
, collected his coat and headed for home.

Strangely enough, though his head was swimming from the quantity of brandy he had consumed, there was no trace of resentment in his muddled thoughts. What a woman she is! What an angel! But, oh, so cruel, so cruel! And he repeated the words to himself until he reached home.

None of the happy throng that went back to dance after supper had noticed that old Count Alvinczy was no longer among them nor had any idea that he had been taken ill.

Balint, who had been supping with Adrienne, escorted her upstairs with the others. When they arrived at the doors of the ballroom she left his arm and for a moment they stood side by side. Balint looked at her questioningly and almost imperceptibly she nodded. Her lips moved, but she said nothing that even he could have heard. Then she moved slowly on alone.

Balint remained at the head of the stairs until the last couple had come up from the supper-room. Then he hurried down,
collected
his fur coat and left on foot.

I
T WAS WELL AFTER MIDDAY
. Through the wooden laths of the shutters the sunlight cast long narrow flame-coloured lines over the carpet, across the polished parquet floor and even vertically some way up the door. The room was filled with a
golden
radiance.

Balint awoke, rang for his valet and ordered his bath to be run. Then he closed his eyes again and sank into a half-slumber filled with tender recollections.

In his mind he could see again a bright fire burning on the hearth, a fire which had thrown an almost blinding light on the deep-piled white carpet on which he lay but which left most of the rest of the room in mysterious shadow. He had lit the fire while waiting.

All at once the door had opened and Adrienne had stood before him, the shining paillettes on her dress reflecting the bright flames of the fire with a reddish glow which spread up over her shadowy breasts, under her chin and past the dark lines of her brows until it shone like a spotlight on the golden flowers of her oriental
diadem
. There she had stood, lit as if on a stage …

For a moment she had not moved, until as Balint knelt before her and started to kiss the hem of her skirt she had spread her arms wide waiting for his lips to reach hers. Then, bending slightly, she had taken his head in her soft hands and bent down until their lips met. As her mouth, so vividly red and slightly open, met his in a long ecstatic kiss, the jewelled chains of her crown fell in a cascade over his face and ears and shoulders.

When the man returned to tell Balint that his bath was ready he announced also that a letter had just been delivered from Baron Kadacsay. ‘A stable-boy brought it, my Lord. I have put it on your Lordship’s desk.’

‘Very good,’ said Balint, his head too full of the memory of his time with Adrienne to take in properly what he had been told. Then he sank into the hot water still thinking only of his mistress.

Around her slender ankles the dress, so like the scales of a snake, had lain in shining coils, from which had risen her
alabaster
figure, the fire etching every part of it with its roseate glow touched here and there with misty lilac-coloured shadows. To Balint she had seemed like some Hindu goddess, Parvati, Maya, or Brahmanaspati, crowned in gold with a shower of rubies and other stones falling over her breasts. And though she had said nothing she had been smiling in happiness and triumph.

She had been like some sculptor’s masterpiece, a statue that somehow exuded joy as he knelt before her raising his hands in supplication and adoration. Later, as she had lain on the rug that so resembled the skin of a polar-bear, naked but still crowned with that jewelled head-dress spread in a wide arc around her
jet-black
curling hair, she had still seemed in some strange way
statuesque
. The fire had exploded with its own ecstasy as the flames reached the pine-cones within it as if it too were consumed with
the passion that enveloped the lovers who lay in front of it. As each new shower of sparks exploded, faster and faster, so had the passion of the two lovers as they moved together in a crescendo of love.

‘When was the letter delivered?’ asked Balint when he had dressed and gone into his sitting-room.

‘Yesterday, my Lord. Quite late, after ten o’clock. A boy brought it on horseback.’

A letter from Gazsi? Sent quite late at night … by a man on horseback? It had to be something exceptionally urgent,
something
really serious.

‘Why didn’t you bring it to me at once? You knew where I was.’

‘The boy just said to hand it to your Lordship. I asked if it was urgent and if something was wrong, but he just said that Baron Gazsi had not said anything in particular and had seemed to be quite well. There was nothing out of the ordinary at home, the boy said.’

Balint hurried over to this desk. The letter lay there, an
ordinary
grey envelope with his name scribbled in Gazsi’s awkward writing, and on the back were scrawled a few words that Gazsi had presumably added as an afterthought ‘
I
stupidly
sent
this
to
Denestornya,
believing you
would
still
be
there
–
Gazsi
’.

The letter itself read:

What on earth could all this be about, Balint wondered. Where was he going? And what a strange little note. He looked at the time; it was already half past one, so if Gazsi had kept to his plan he would have already gone.

Could he have caught the one-thirty express to Budapest? He hadn’t said anything about it; and anyhow if that had been his plan he would probably have ridden over himself instead of
asking
Balint to come to him. Perhaps he had had some mishap on the road and gone straight to the station.

None of this seemed likely. Gazsi would never have written
like that if he were just setting off on some everyday little trip. It had to be something else, something infinitely more serious. Balint thought back to their last conversation at the banquet and it occurred to him now that Gazsi had seemed unusually
disillusioned
and depressed, that most of his talk about his future plans could have been interpreted in more than one sense, and that everything he had said might perhaps have referred to his
imminent
death rather than to some imaginary voyage. After all, Balint reflected, had it not been he himself, rather than Gazsi, who had talked about going on his travels and who had even
proposed
it? Brushing away such morbid thoughts Balint once more convinced himself that obviously Gazsi had wanted to consult him further about possible travel plans. And yet this did not seem like his friend. No! It was far more likely that before going away he wanted to entrust something to Balint, to make some
arrangement
about the management of his horses or the administration of his property … that would be it! That was why he had asked for him; and Balint believed in this happy solution because he was so happy himself that this was what he wanted to believe. All the same a little pin-prick of anxiety remained.

Whatever the reason it was obvious that he must answer the summons at once, and ten minutes later his car was speeding along the highway that led up the valley of the Felek.

It was a day of radiant sunshine even though Spring had not yet come. The snows had recently melted on the hillsides and now all the south-facing meadows and slopes looked as if they had just been washed. There was not a speck of dust anywhere and it was too early for the weeds to have started springing up. Everything had been sluiced clean by the melting snow, as if the countryside had just been prepared for some joyous feast. On the north-facing slopes the snow still lay, gleaming white in the sun and, as it too was now slowly melting away, everything that might have soiled its surfaces had sunk to the earth and from its edges tiny rivulets of water were now beginning the seasonal change that the sun had already achieved on the other side of the valley.

Balint fancied that he could already smell the first scents of Spring.

The car purred effortlessly up the last incline in the road. Balint knew he would be at St Marton in another fifteen minutes and that very shortly afterwards he would be at Gazsi’s place.

Once again he wondered what on earth it was that Gazsi could have wanted so urgently as to send for him like that. As he
drew nearer and nearer to his destination all Balint’s suppressed anxieties rose up and assailed him once more; and no matter how much he tried to reassure himself that he was being stupid and unreasonable he was unable to banish them entirely. Again and again he found himself thinking of those words in the letter ‘
I
do
not
expect
to
be
back
for
a
long
time
…
Sorry
to
inconvenience
you.
It
will
be
the
last
time,
I
promise
!
’
Had he not also written:
‘
I
don’t
know
if I’ll
ever
be
back.
’
What strange words they were! In themselves they may have seemed banal and without great significance, but knowing Kadacsay’s bitter indictment of himself, Balint felt they must have some other meaning, ominous even if not obvious. He remembered too that Gazsi had once said to him that in the life of a man troubles and joys are usually equally balanced, but when something occurred to so upset the balance that nothing was left but trouble and misery then the only answer was to kill oneself. Of course when he had said this Gazsi had seemed
unusually
disheartened and miserable.

Balint tried to go over in his mind everything that Gazsi had ever said to him and as he did so he tried to remember some words that might have been more reassuring. Try as he would he could not think of anything. On the contrary, thinking back to those discussions when Gazsi had asked him to be his executor, and also when he had arranged that Balint would take in his beloved mare, Balint now realized there had been a double
meaning
in every word that Gazsi had uttered.

For a brief moment Balint half closed his eyes so as to concentrate better, and as he did so the sunlight through his eyelids seemed rose-red and all his worries disappeared as he saw in his mind’s eye the image of Adrienne as she had been in the firelight, with her parted lips and wide open eyes, with her expression of almost
painful
anticipation of that moment when all space and time were wiped away, when there was no past and no future and when time itself became an eternity. Her beautiful face, framed in those wildly tumbling curls, could have been that of Medusa or the Tragic Muse herself, and for a moment Balint saw only this and felt only the surge of renewed desire …

An instant later he was able to banish the thought as he forced himself once more to think about his friend and pray, as he sped towards him through that countryside halfway between winter and spring, that Gazsi had only written to him in that equivocal manner as a result of some passing fancy or fit of depression at being delayed in some ridiculous fashion, and that he was even
now at home, laughing at his own stupidity, with his crow’s beak of a nose tilted to one side as it always was when he was
telling
a droll story about himself and when nothing was seriously wrong.