The Balkan Trilogy (101 page)

The lawn was set with citrus trees that stood about in solitary poses like dancers waiting to open a ballet. Harriet kept her back turned to Charles Warden but, pausing to examine some small green lemons, she glanced round in spite of herself and saw him watching her behaviour with an ironical smile. She was gone at once. Catching up with the Major, she defiantly renewed her enthusiasm.

As they rounded the house and came in sight of the sea, the clouds were split by streaks of cherry pink. The sun was setting in a refulgence hidden from human eye. For an instant, the garden was touched with an autumnal glow, then the clouds closed and there was nothing but the wintry twilight.

‘Yes,’ said the Major regretfully, ‘we must go in; but you will come again, won’t you? You
really
will? I give a few little parties during the winter, just to help me pass the gloomy weeks. There’s always a shortage of pretty girls – I mean, of course, pretty English girls. Plenty of lovely Greeks, and how lovely they can be! Still, English girls are a thing apart: so slender, so pink and white, so
natural
! Do promise you will come?’

Smiling modestly, Harriet promised.

The chandeliers had been lit inside the golden drawing-room. The Major tinkled on the glass, at the same time opening the door and saying: ‘May we join you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Callard, as though he could not understand what they were doing out there.

Apparently the talk inside the room had finished some time before. Harriet had entered in high spirits but, meeting Guy’s eye, she lost her buoyancy. He gave her a warning glance, then stared down heavily at the floor. Now, she only wanted
to leave this treacherous company, but the Major was saying: ‘Come along. You’ve got your business over, so let’s have a jolly tea.’

The dining-room was on the other side of the hall. Tea was served on a table with rococo gilt legs and a surface of coloured marbles. The marbles formed a composition of fruits and game entitled in letters of gold: ‘The Pleasures of Plenty’. Placed on the centre of the picture was a plate of very small cakes. The Major said:

‘Dear me, look at them! As cakes increase in price, they decrease in size. One day, I fear, they’ll vanish altogether.’

As though he found these remarks frivolous or vulgar, Archie Callard said: ‘Then you won’t have to pay for them.’

The Major laughed, knowing himself reproved, and went on in a pleading tone: ‘But, Archie, such absurd little cakes! Do look at this one! Who would have the heart to eat it? Really, I’m ashamed, but …’ He turned to Harriet: ‘It’s not easy to get any these days, even at the Xenia. Don’t you find shopping
terribly
difficult?’

‘We live in an hotel,’ she said.

‘How wise! But not, I hope, at the G.B.? I hear the Military Mission has taken possession of our darling G.B. and all our friends have been turned out. So sad to be turned out of one’s suite at a time like this! Dear knows where they’ve all gone. And no more cocktail parties in that pretty lounge! Not that there have been many since the evacuation ship took the ladies away. Still,’ he added quickly: ‘We mustn’t complain. Others have come in their place.’

‘Really!’ said Archie Callard, ‘you seem to suggest that the ship took the rightful occupants of Athens and left behind nothing but wartime flotsam.’

‘Archie, that’s quite enough!’

Delighted at having shocked the Major, Callard gave his attention to Charles Warden. He wanted to know
all
about the Mission. What was its function? How many officers were there? What position would Charles himself hold?

Speaking stiffly and briefly, the young man said he knew
nothing. The Mission had only just arrived.

There was, Harriet thought, a hint of self-importance in his tone and she condemned him not only as an unpleasant young man but as one who took himself too seriously.

The telephone rang somewhere in the house. A servant came to say that Mr Callard was wanted.

Archie Callard, tilting his head back with a fretful air, asked who was on the line. When told the British Legation, he said: ‘Oh, dear!’ The Major sighed as though to say that this was what life was like these days.

When Callard went off, the others waited in silence. Glancing at Charles Warden, Harriet found his gaze fixed on her and she turned her head away. He said to Cookson: ‘I’m afraid I must get back to the office.’

‘But
you
don’t have to go, do you?’ the Major smiled on Guy and Harriet. ‘
Please
stay and have a glass of sherry!’

Before they could reply, Archie Callard returned with a rapid step, his manner dramatically changed. Both his fraudulent gravity and his irony were gone. Now he was not playing a part. With face fixed in the hauteur of rage, he ignored the guests and demanded of Cookson: ‘Did you know Bedlington was in Cairo?’

‘Bedlington in Cairo? No, no. I didn’t.’ Bewildered and alarmed, the Major dabbed at his nostrils. ‘But what of it? What has happened?’

‘You should have known.’

‘Perhaps I should, but no one told me. People are too busy to keep me posted and, living down here, I’m a bit out of things. Why are you so annoyed? What’s the matter?’

‘I’ll tell you later.’ Callard made off again, slamming the door as he went.

‘What can it be?’ said the unhappy Major. ‘Archie’s such a temperamental boy! It’s probably something quite trivial.’

The invitation to sherry was not repeated. The Major’s anxiety was such he scarcely noticed that the guests left together.

A staff car was waiting outside for Charles Warden and he
offered the Pringles a lift. Heartened by this kindness, Guy rapidly regained his spirits and as they drove up the dark Piraeus road, was voluble about an entertainment which he planned to put on for the airmen at Tatoi. He may only just have thought of it – certainly Harriet had heard nothing about it – but now as he talked, the idea developed and inspired him. The Phaleron interview was forgotten. If he had been depressed, he was depressed no longer; and Harriet marvelled at his powers of recuperation.

If he had been offered nothing, if his future was (as she feared) vacant, he was already filling the vacancy with projects. The entertainment at Tatoi was only one thing. He discussed the possibility of producing
Othello
or
Macbeth
. And why should he not restage
Troilus and Cressida
?

Was there ever any need to pity him! He was never, as she too often was, disabled by disappointment. He simply turned his back on it.

Harriet noticed that Charles Warden laughed with Guy, not at him. Listening to Guy’s schemes, he murmured as though Guy and Guy’s vitality were things he had seldom, if ever, encountered before. She realized now that his restraint when replying to Callard had shown not self-importance but a disapproval of Callard’s insolent wit. She had to admit the young man was by no means as unpleasant as she had wished to believe.

The car stopped outside the main entrance to the Grande Bretagne.

‘Let’s meet again soon,’ said Guy.

‘Yes, we must,’ Charles Warden agreed.

Walking back to their hotel, Guy could talk of nothing but this new friendship until Harriet broke in: ‘Darling, tell me what Callard had to offer.’

‘Oh!’ Guy did not want any intrusion upon his felicity. In an offhand way, as though the whole matter were of no consequence, he said: ‘Not much. In fact, he wasn’t able to promise anything.’

‘But he must have had some reason for sending for you?’

‘He wanted to see me, that’s all.’

‘Didn’t he tell you anything?’

‘Well, yes. He told me … he felt he ought to tell me personally – which was, after all, very decent of him – that he had been forced to make Dubedat his Chief Instructor. He had no choice. Gracey made him promise.’

‘I see.’ For some minutes her disappointment was such she could not say anything more.

Guy talked on, doing all he could to justify Callard. Knowing that what he said was a measure of his own disappointment, Harriet listened and grew angry for his sake. She said at the end:

‘So Archie Callard was appointed on the understanding that he rewarded Dubedat for Dubedat’s services to Gracey?’

‘It looks like that. I will say Callard was rather apologetic. He said: “I’m sorry about this. I hope you won’t refuse to work under Dubedat?”’

‘He expects you to work under Dubedat? He must be mad.’

‘He said there would be work, but not immediately. He hopes to fit me in when things get under way. I must say, I rather liked Callard. He’s not at all a bad chap.’

‘Perhaps he isn’t. But here you are, the best English instructor in the place, expected to hang around in the hope that Dubedat will offer you a few hours’ teaching. It’s monstrous!’

‘I came here against orders. I’ll have to take any work I can get.’

‘What’s this about Lord Bedlington being in Cairo? Couldn’t you write to him or cable him? You have a London appointment. You’ve a right to state your case.’

‘Perhaps, but what good would it do? Bedlington knows nothing about me. Gracey, Callard and, I suppose, Cookson have all backed Dubedat. There’s no one to back me. I’m merely an interloper here. The fact that I was appointed in London doesn’t give me a divine right to a plum job. I could make trouble – but if I do that and gain nothing by it, I’m in wrong with the Organization for the rest of my career.’ Guy put his arm round Harriet’s disconsolate shoulder and
squeezed it: ‘Don’t worry. Dubedat’s got the job and good luck to him. We’ll work together all right.’

‘You
won’t
work together. You’ll do the work, and Dubedat will throw his weight around.’

Guy’s tolerance of the situation annoyed Harriet more than the situation itself. He had achieved education and now, she suspected, his ambition had come to a stop. In his spiritual indolence, he would be the prey of those with more ambition; and he would not worry. It was, after all, easier to be used than to use.

She asked bitterly: ‘Will it be like this all our lives?’

‘Like what?’

‘You doing the work while other people get the importance.’

‘For heaven’s sake, darling, what do you want? Would you prefer that I became an administrator: a smart Alec battening on other men’s talents?’

‘Why not, if there’s more money in it? Why should you be paid less for your talents than other men are for the lack of them? Why do you encourage such a situation?’

‘I don’t. It’s the nature of things under this social system. When we have a people’s government, we’ll change all that.’

‘I wonder.’

They had reached the hotel. Her hands were clenched and Guy, picking them up and folding them into his own hands, smiled into her small, pale, angry face, saying, as he had said many times before: ‘“Oh, stand between her and her fighting soul.”’

‘Someone has to fight,’ she said. Repeating a remark she had heard as a child, she added: ‘If you don’t fight, they’ll trample you into the ground.’

Guy laughed at her: ‘Who are “they”?’

‘People. Life. The world.’

‘You don’t really believe that?’

She did not reply. She was more hurt for him than he was for himself. She had imagined because he was amiable, he must be fortunate, and now she saw others, neither able nor
amiable, put in front of him. She felt cheated but tried to reconcile herself to things. ‘I suppose we are lucky to be here; and we’re lucky to be together. If you’re prepared to work under Dubedat, well, there’s no more to be said.’

‘I’m prepared to work. It doesn’t matter whom I work under. I’m lucky to be employed. My father was unemployed half his life and I saw what it did to him. We’ve nothing to complain of. Other men are fighting and getting killed for people like us.’

‘Yes,’ she said and embraced him because he was with her and alive.

An announcement in the English newspaper stated that the School would open under the Directorship of Mr Archibald Callard. Mr Dubedat was to be Chief Instructor and Mr Lush would assist him. But, for some reason, there was a delay.

The students returned to the School and waited about in the library and the lecture-room but Mr Callard, Mr Dubedat and Mr Lush did not appear. The librarian-secretary said they were not in the building. There was no one to enrol students. The offices were locked and remained locked for the next couple of weeks.

12

It was a dull December. The Greek advance had come to a stop. The papers explained that this was a necessary remission: the supply line must be strengthened, supplies brought up and forces rearranged. There was no cause to be downcast. But the victories, the bell-ringing, the dancing, the comradeship of triumph – these things were missing, and the city became limp in anti-climax. Even the spectacle of the Italian prisoners did little to distract people in a hard winter when it was as cold indoors as out and food was disappearing from the shops.

The prisoners were marshalled through the main streets: a straggle of men in tattered uniforms, hatless, heads bent so that the rain could drip from their hair. They were defeated men yet in every batch there were some who seemed untroubled by their plight, or who glanced at the bystanders with furtive and conciliatory smiles, or gave the impression that the whole thing was a farce.

‘Where are they going?’ people asked, fearful that there would be more mouths to feed, but the prisoners were not to stay in Greece. They were taken to the Piraeus and shipped to camps in the western desert.

No wonder there were some who smiled. They would eat better than the Greeks and a camp in the sun was more comfortable than the Albanian mountains where men bivouacked waist deep in the snow.

At the canteen started for British servicemen, Guy washed dishes and Harriet worked as a waitress. The men were mostly
airmen, but a few sappers and members of the R.A.S.C. had arrived. Food and fuel were supplied by the Naafi and the civilians were thankful these winter nights not only for occupation, but for warmth.

The wives of the English diplomats organized the work and agreed among themselves that the food should be for the servicemen and only for them. They were honour bound not to touch a mouthful themselves. In the first throes of unaccustomed hunger, the women fried bacon, sausages, eggs and tomatoes and served men who accepted their plates casually and took it for granted that the civilians ate as much as they did.