Shadow of a Hero (28 page)

‘It seems to me I shall still have to talk to my policeman,’ he said.

‘No! Please!’ said Momma. ‘Van’s been punished enough.’

‘I am partly thinking about Van. We have to shield him from Hector and his friends.’

‘I’m going to ring the hospital and see if I can get him a private room. And, Letta, you must send him a card saying everything’s all right.’

‘That is sensible, but it is a short-term measure. We must persuade these people to leave Van alone indefinitely. Suppose they were led to believe that Van was being followed by the British security services, who then took advantage of the accident to search the motor cycle, and discovered the bomb, and removed it, I think Hector would rapidly retract his patriotism into activities such as bagpipe-dancing. He is not the stuff of heroes, you know. I can tell my policeman enough to give him cause to interview Hector, but not enough to incriminate Van. Then, when Van is well enough, he must be given the same version of events . . . Minna, dear, you had better call the hospital before it is too late.’

‘I suppose so. I haven’t given you your pills.’

‘Letta can do that. Will you take these things now?’

He flicked his hand contemptuously towards the packages.

‘I’ll put them straight in the car. I must set my alarm. I want to get there when it’s just light. Oh, Poppa, please, please be careful what you say! Letta, you’ll have to get your own breakfast. And your Poppa’s going to ring any minute. Oh, what am I going to tell him now?’

The sentences came in gasps, with slow indrawn breaths between. She sounded at the end of her tether, but then she straightened, moving her head from side to side as if she were easing her neck, and picked up the packages.

‘All right,’ she said, in her normal brisk voice. ‘I think that’s the best we can do. Goodnight, Poppa. Thank heavens you’re here. Don’t be too late, Letta, and remember to set your alarm. If you hear mine, just go back to sleep.’

She left. Grandad made some more notes while Letta started counting the pills out, thinking as she did so about what had just happened. Something struck her and she looked round. The movement must have caught his eye, because he glanced up enquiringly.

‘You said “partly”,’ she said.

He raised his eyebrows.

‘You were thinking partly about Van.’

‘Yes. My darling, this is something I need to talk to you about. I was also thinking partly about Varina. We have an even more dangerous state of affairs than I had realized, but at the same time there is a glimmer of hope. My policeman is in fact a very good friend, and we agree about most things, but he has had difficulty in persuading his
masters
to take Varina, and especially Otto Vasa, sufficiently seriously. They have other things on their minds. I think I can tell him exactly enough to give him the evidence he needs, so that his masters will then think it worthwhile to put pressure on the government in Bucharest to counter Vasa’s activities by allowing me back into the country.’

‘No!’

Letta had almost shouted the word. Grandad looked at her in surprise. He smiled, nodded and put his pencil and pad aside.

‘You still forbid me to go?’ he said.

‘No, of course not. I can’t forbid you anything. I just don’t want you to, that’s all.’

‘You don’t remember? Last summer – when was it? Soon after we started reading the Legends, I think – we had almost this conversation, and in the course of it I told you I would not go permanently back to Varina without your permission.’

‘Unless I could come too, I said.’

‘I’m afraid there is no question of that.’

‘I know . . . Anyway, it doesn’t count. We didn’t really mean it, did we? It was a sort of game we were playing.’

‘I meant it.’

‘Oh . . . Still . . . It’s not my . . . But anyway, it isn’t fair, Grandad! On you, I mean. You aren’t well. You’re . . . Do you want to go?’

He put the ghost fingers against the real ones and cocked his head to one side.

‘I have asked myself that often,’ he said. ‘The answer is, I don’t know. I should of course prefer to die in Varina – remember that, my darling, if it should happen. That apart, the question is unimportant, trivial. If I have the opportunity and
refuse
it, what will have been the point of my life? What will have been the point of my bearing the name I bear? You see?’

‘No. No I don’t. Whatever happens, you’re you. Whatever you’re called. There isn’t anyone else like you and there never will be. Oh, please . . . I’m not allowed to say that, am I? I’m supposed to say “If you must go, then you must go.” But I won’t. I won’t!’

He was looking at her, nodding his head, considering.

‘You do forbid me, then?’ he said.

‘No, it isn’t like that. I’ve told you, I can’t.’

‘You could, and if you did I think . . . I think I would stay. Remember that I am not sure that even if I were allowed to go I could achieve anything. I am old. I am tired. It is very likely too late. I am telling you the truth, my darling. I do not know.’

He started to take his pills, one at a time, with sips of water between. Letta watched him. His hand quivered as he lifted the glass. A moment ago he had been full of energy, but now he looked as frail as a fallen leaf. What could one old man do?

The window was open and the curtains drawn. The town lights glowed below, and glowed again from the cloud-base above. Somebody was having a party a couple of streets down the hill. There were whoops and cheering. The noise reminded Letta of sitting with her back against the sun-warmed wall of ruined St Valia’s, listening to the noise of Potok rejoicing in the festival, and that in turn reminded her of the picture, almost like a vision, she had seen in her mind when she was sitting with Biddie in Richoux, the war-planes screaming between the mountains, the stampeding
crowd
in the square, Parvla falling under their feet . . . It wasn’t anything to do with what she wanted, she realized, or with what Grandad himself wanted, for himself. Perhaps he could make the difference. And if he couldn’t, then no-one could.

‘I think you’re sort of fixed,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to go if they’ll let you, haven’t you?’

‘I’m afraid so, my darling.’

LEGEND

Restaur Vax and the Bishop: II

THE PRINCES OF
the World came to Potok to see Bishop Pango enthroned Prince of Varina, and there was a great feast, and wine flowed from every fountain, and all went late to bed. But Bishop Pango was troubled by a dream and could not sleep, so he rose, and dressed himself as a poor priest and let himself out by a side door, and walked down by the river below St Valia.

At the water’s edge one came walking towards him, leading a great horse, wearing a sword at his belt and bearing a musket on his shoulder.

The Bishop said, ‘Where do you go, my son, carrying these weapons of war, now that Varina is at peace?’

The man answered, ‘These are gifts I had from Bishop Pango to fight the Turk. I would return them to him now that the Turks are gone.’
¹

By that the Bishop knew that he spoke to Restaur Vax, whom he thought to be far off in Rome. And he was troubled, for under the terms of peace agreed among the Princes of the World, Restaur
Vax
must not set foot in Varina, for the Turk could then also return and take away his Princedom. Nevertheless, knowing what debt Varina owed to the hero, he, Bishop Pango, knelt by the waterside and asked for a blessing.

Restaur Vax said, ‘My blessing is on you and all Varina, until the Turks return. See that my horse is well fed, and lodge my gun and my sword among your rafters. But when you have need of me, let my horse be led forth and saddled, and my sword strapped to the pommel. Then fire my gun three times into the air, and I will return.’
²

Then he raised Bishop Pango to his feet and kissed him on both cheeks and put the sword and the musket and the reins into his hands, and vanished.

By this Bishop Pango knew that he had seen only the shadow of the hero, and that Restaur Vax himself was dead, far off in Rome, across the sea. And within a week came a messenger with news that it was so.
³

¹
Under the Treaty of Milan, Varina was given full self-government, but remained technically part of the Turkish Empire until 1868, when the suzerainty was transferred to the Austrian Empire. A Vizier was appointed by Byzantium to ‘advise’ the Prince-Bishop, but his duties were purely ceremonial.

²
Edward Lear, who made a sketching trip through Varina in 1873, records seeing four separate skeletons of Restaur Vax’s horse, with the same legend attached to each of them.

³
This is perhaps the most popular of all Varinian legends. Nevertheless its chronology is completely mistaken. Pango was enthroned as Prince-Bishop on St Joseph’s Day, 27 August 1828, shortly after the Treaty of Milan. He died in 1850. Restaur Vax lived until 1865. His widow brought his body for burial in the family grave at Talosh when the Austrian Empire assumed hegemony of Varina in 1868.

SEPTEMBER 1991

LETTA WAS STARING
out of the window of what used to be Grandad’s room, and was now going to be hers. When he’d left for Varina she had come up here once a week to dust and sweep and air, so that if he came back he could move straight in. She’d known in her heart that he wasn’t coming back, but it had been a sort of magic, a way of looking after him, as if, by pretending that one day he would come back, he had to stay alive for it to be true. Even now, when the magic hadn’t worked, she was glad that she’d done it.

Almost as soon as the news had come she’d asked Momma, not knowing how to put it without hurting, if she could move up here, and Momma had seemed pleased and said, ‘Yes, of course. He’d like that.’

She’d begun by clearing a lot of Grandad’s books into boxes, not anything in Field or Formal, and not the battered old Wordsworths and Walter Scotts he’d used to teach himself English, but the political ones and the ones in languages she couldn’t read. She’d worked steadily until the thought came to her that school was starting tomorrow, and that meant it must be exactly a year since she’d sat here talking about whether he had to go back to Varina. A wave of sadness washed through her at the thought that she would never
see
him again, so she stopped sorting and stood by the window, not really crying but seeing the roofs and the tree-tops mistily.

It was all right, she told herself. He’d said he wanted to die in Varina. She didn’t mind that the Romanians had said they couldn’t all go out to the funeral. Horrible Otto Vasa was sure to have hijacked it, of course, and even if he hadn’t, it would still have been a great public thing, a nation mourning its hero. It would all have been about Restaur Vax, not Grandad. Grandad was crumpets oozing with butter. He was a boy who had stared out of a schoolroom window, hating Past Conditional Optatives. He was an outlaw who’d slipped down from the hills by night to hold his almost unknown daughter on his lap. The hero was a sort of shadow. Grandad was the solid, living person who had cast the shadow. He was what mattered.

Someone on the stairs! But there was no-one in the house! Then she heard the uneven tread, climb and drag, climb and drag, and her fright changed to a different kind of tension. Things had never been right between her and Van since the accident. For a few days she’d managed to avoid any questions by always visiting him at the same time as Momma, but then there’d come a visit when she’d known at once that something was badly wrong, and he’d practically ordered Momma to go and talk to the Sister about something and as soon as she was out of earshot he’d said, ‘I’ve had a card from a chap called Andrei – friend of Otto’s. It had a lot of red roses on it. He asked me whether they were the right colour. What’s up? You sent me this.’

He held up her card with its field of yellow
daisies
. She’d gulped, though she’d known it was bound to happen sooner or later.

‘I’m sorry,’ she’d said. ‘I didn’t want you to worry.’

‘You lied to me.’

‘I thought I’d better.’

‘None of your business, Sis. So what happened?’

‘We went out to the garage. Your clothes and books were there OK, but there was nothing in the secret compartments.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t see it. How on earth could that have happened? I hadn’t taken my eyes off the machine. I’d slept with it, even . . .’

‘I suppose somebody could have been following you and seen the accident.’

He’d thought about it, and nodded.

‘You told Hector red, I suppose,’ he’d said. ‘I haven’t had a squeak out of him, you know . . . Well, don’t lie to me again, Sis. It’s not up to you to decide what’s good for me, see?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she’d said, miserably, feeling the new lie inside her, like vomit she had to keep down. The feeling was still there now, after a whole year. There seemed to be no way she could tell him, and she wouldn’t get rid of it until she had. She wiped her eyes, turned and waited till he put his head round the door.

‘Moving in?’ he said with a sharp smile.

‘Do you mind? Momma said it was OK. In fact, she said it was a good idea.’

He nodded and limped across to look at the half-empty book-shelves.

‘No,’ he said, harshly. ‘It’s all yours. I’m not stepping into the old boy’s shoes.’

He turned and looked at her with the same hard, angry smile.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me where I’ve been?’ he said.

She hadn’t been meaning to. When Van had simply disappeared, in the middle of a physiotherapy course for his foot, they’d all guessed that he was trying to get to Grandad’s funeral, whether the Romanians let him or not. He couldn’t have done it alone. He’d have had to ask Otto Vasa for help, and if it wasn’t for Otto Vasa Grandad might very well still be alive. While half of what used to be Yugoslavia boiled into war close by, Grandad had gone back to Varina to try to prevent the same thing happening there, but Otto Vasa kept on stirring things up. Grandad was tired, and old, and his doctors kept telling him to rest, but he hadn’t been able to. And then, twelve days ago, the man Grandad used to call his policeman had rung Momma in the evening to say that Grandad was dead. That was all he knew.