The Balkan Trilogy (125 page)

When she found herself back at Constitution Square, she stopped out of a sense of futility. Why go anywhere? She simply stood until she saw Guy coming towards her. Her impulse was to avoid him, but he had already seen her and as he came towards her, he asked: ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Charles has gone.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He took her fingers and squeezed them, looking at her with a quizzical sympathy as though her unhappiness were something in which he had no part. He was sorry for her. Feeling she did not want this sort of commiseration, she detached her fingers from his hold.

He asked where she was going? She did not know but said: ‘We could see if the Judas trees are coming out.’

Guy considered this, but of course it was not possible: ‘I’ve a date with Ben,’ he said. ‘He’s trying to get a call through to Belgrade. If he can’t reach Belgrade, he’ll try Zagreb. He may be able to find what’s happened to the Legation people.’

‘No sign of David yet?’

‘None; no news of any sort. I’ve met most of the trains. The road beside the School runs straight through to the station, so I can get there quickly. The trains are packed to the doors. I’ve spoken to a lot of people, but there’s such a flap, it’s hard to discover what’s happening inside Yugoslavia. I suppose the Legation will see it out to the end.’

‘But David has no diplomatic protection?’

‘No. Well, I must get on.’ Before leaving, Guy wanted to see her comfortably disposed and said: ‘Tandy and Yakimov are at Zonar’s. Why don’t you go and have tea with them?’

‘No. I won’t be in the office this evening. In fact, I won’t be going back there. My job’s packed up. I think I’ll take the metro home.’

‘Yes, do that. I can’t get back for supper, but I won’t be late.’

Guy sped happily on his way, seeing her problems as settled.

The climbing plant on the villa roof had come into leaf and, spreading over the pergola, was forming a thatch against the sun. It had budded and now the buds were starting to open. The little white waxen flowers had a scent like perfumed chocolate. Anastea had told Harriet that in summer the Kyrios and Kyria would take their breakfast and supper under the pergola at the marble table, and soon the Pringles would be able to do the same thing.

Since the district had taken on the verdancy of spring, its atmosphere had changed. Harriet sometimes walked beside the little trickle that was the Ilissus, or up among the pines that overhung the river-bed. The villa was at last beginning to seem a home, but a disturbed, precarious home. Though it was not within the target area, it was near enough to the harbour to be shaken by gun-fire, and when there were night
raids, the Pringles would sit up reading, having no hope of sleep till the ‘all clear’ sounded.

Up among the pine trees she had met a cat which followed her to the edge of the wood but would not come into the open. It was a thin, little, black female, its dugs swelling out pink from the sparse black fur, so she knew it had kittens somewhere. She thought it must have a home in one of the shacks beyond the trees. It was obviously a home where there was not much to eat, but there was not much to eat anywhere these days. Harriet knew the cat’s eager attentiveness was an appeal for food. There was nothing at the villa except the grey, dry tasteless bread they had for breakfast. She took some to the wood and the cat devoured it with savage exultation.

She asked Anastea to whom the cat might belong, but Anastea treated the question with contempt. Seeing Harriet put the bread into her pocket, she grumbled to herself. Harriet did not understand what she said but could guess: if there was bread to spare, there were human beings in need of it.

One day Harriet saw the kittens. She had crossed the wasteland as far as the first of the shacks and when she reached it, she found it derelict. The cat was a wild cat. The kittens were plain, starved creatures, tabby and white, and Harriet wondered how the mother had managed to bring them up; but they played happily in the sunlight, not knowing they were among the underprivileged of the world. One day when Harriet went to feed them, they had gone. The cat was there, perplexed and anxious, but the kittens had disappeared.

When she returned home on the afternoon of Charles’s departure, Harriet had the cat in mind. It gave her some sort of attachment to life. She had fed it before out of a sense of duty to a creature in need; now, suddenly, she felt love for it, and began to fear that in her absence some harm could have come to it. She went first to the large grocery shop in University Street and queued for bread. It was a shop that in peace-time sold only the finest European foods. Now the shelves were empty. Behind the counter there were some boxes of dried figs and a sack of butter-beans. Harriet was allowed a few
grammes of each, and because she was English the assistant opened a drawer and took out a strip of salted cod. He cut off a small piece and she accepted it as a sign of favour, although she felt she had no right to it.

Back at the villa, she found Anastea in the kitchen. A little skeleton of a woman in a black cotton dress and head-scarf, she was sitting on a stool, her hands lying in her lap, upwards, so Harriet could see the hard, pinkish skin of the palms scored over with lines, like the top of an old school desk. Her work was finished; she was free to go home, but she preferred to remain amid the splendours of the rich people’s home.

Harriet kept the food in her bag and took it to the bathroom where she cut the fish with scissors and soaked it in the wash-hand basin. When she had got some of the salt from it, she took it to the wood and fed the cat.

28

Some time during the night an anti-aircraft gun was placed on the hill behind the villa.

Guy had almost reached the bus-stop next morning when the sirens sounded. At once the new gun opened up, so close that the noise was shattering. He hurried to the villa where he found Harriet, who had been in the bath, crouching naked under the stairs while Anastea, on her knees near by, was swinging backwards and forwards, hitting the floor with her brow and crossing herself, while she muttered prayers in an ecstasy of terror. The two women were completely unhinged by the uproar overhead.

As Guy stared at them in wonder and compassion, Harriet flung herself upon him crying: ‘What is it? What is it?’

‘Good heavens, it’s only an anti-aircraft gun.’ His own nerves were untouched by the racket but after two hours of it – the raid was the longest of the war – Harriet had become used to it while he, trapped inactive in the villa, felt he could bear no more.

‘We can’t live here with this banging away at all hours. The house has become unlivable-in,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to find somewhere else.’

Harriet, who could scarcely face another move, felt the responsiblity of the cat and said: ‘It’s scarcely worth leaving now. We’ve stuck it so long, we might just as well stick it to the end. Besides, where can we go?’ Many hotels had been requisitioned by the British military and those that remained had been packed by repeated waves of refugees. She said: ‘We can’t afford the Corinthian or the King George; even if we
got into a small hotel, heaven knows what we’d have to pay now.’

The raid over, they went up to the roof and watched smoke rising in black, slow, greasy clouds from somewhere along the coast. Anastea, who had followed them, said the smoke came from Eleusis where there was a munitions factory. The sight seemed to inspire her and she began to talk very quickly, making gestures of appeal at Guy. Apparently she was urging him to do something, but it was some time before he understood that men of the district were cutting an air-raid shelter in the rock by the Ilissus. The shelter was to contain seats which would be reserved for those who could pay for them. Anastea had learnt this from the men that morning. When she said she could not afford a seat, they told her to ask Guy to buy her one. How much were the seats? Guy asked and she replied, ‘Thirty thousand drachma.’ Guy and Harriet looked at one another and laughed. The sum seemed fantastic to them, but it had no reality for Anastea. Foreigners who could afford a villa with bathroom and kitchen could afford anything.

‘Do you think the men were pulling her leg?’ Harriet asked. ‘It’s probably thirty drachma.’

But Anastea insisted that the sum needed was thirty thousand. When Guy explained that it was far beyond anything he could afford, Anastea’s face fell dolefully.

‘How old do you think she is?’ Guy asked when she had gone downstairs.

‘She looks eighty but perhaps she’s not much more than seventy.’ Whatever she was, she had been aged out of calculable time by work, hardship and near-starvation. Harriet wondered would she herself, when half a century or more had passed, be so eager to preserve her life. Not long ago, she had spoken of life as a fortune that must be preserved, yet already its riches seemed lost – not squandered or misapplied, but somehow forfeit as a result of misunderstanding. She did not think that any explanation could bring them back and did not, in fact, know what explanation to give.

When Guy set out again, he asked her if she were coming into Athens, too. She could think of no reason for going: she had no job, nothing to do and would have to spend her time walking about in streets that could hold nothing for her. At least, if she remained, she had the cat.

Guy said, as he had said often before: ‘I’ll get back early.’

She laughed unbelievingly, having no faith in these promises, and found him watching her with the same quizzical but detached concern that he had accorded her when she told him Charles had gone.

‘Of course I will,’ he assured her. ‘Tell Anastea to try and find something for supper. We’ll eat at home, shall we?’

‘All right.’ She was pleased, but his insistence that he would indeed return disconcerted her like a solution of a problem that had come too late. The problem did not affect her any longer: it had not been solved but it had, she felt, been bypassed. Much more to the point these days was the question of what to give the cat. She sent Anastea to the shops and when the old woman was safely out of the way, she went to the kitchen and collected some scraps of food, but the cat was not in the wood. She walked to the hut where the kittens had lived. The cat was not there. She stood for a long time calling it, but in the end gave up the search, supposing it had gone off on a food-hunt of its own.

The evening was one of the few that they had spent in their living-room with its comfortless, functional furniture. The electric light was dim. Shut inside by the black-out curtains, Harriet mended clothes while Guy sat over his books, contemplating a lecture on the thesis: ‘A work of art must contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise.’

‘Who said that?’ Harriet asked.

‘Coleridge.’

‘Does life contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise?’

‘If it doesn’t, nothing does.’

‘But you think it does?’

‘It must do.’

‘You’re becoming a mystic,’ she said and after a long pause, added: ‘There are so many dead bodies in the ruins of Belgrade, people have stopped trying to bury them. They just cover them with flowers.’

‘Where did you hear that?’

‘I heard it before I left the office. It was the last piece of news to come out of Yugoslavia.’

Guy shook his head, but did not try to comment. There was a period of quiet, then a sound of rough and tuneless singing came from the top of the lane where some men had gathered in one of the half-built houses to raise their voices against the darkness.

As the singing went on and on, Harriet began to feel it unbearable and suddenly cried out: ‘Make them stop.’ Before Guy could say anything, she ran to the kitchen and told Anastea to go out and deal with the singers. Anastea shouted a command up the lane and the song came abruptly to a stop.

Shocked, Guy asked: ‘How could you do that?’

Harriet did not look at him: she was nearly weeping.

‘They may be men on leave, or invalided from the front. Really, how
could
you?’

He was so seldom angry that she felt stunned by his reprimand. She shook her head. She did not know, she really did not know how she could do it, or even why she did do it. She wanted Guy to forget the incident but as he returned to his books, his face was creased with concern for the men slighted in that way. It did not relax, and suddenly she collapsed and began to cry helplessly, unable to swallow back her own guilt and remorse and the personal grief shut up inside her.

Guy watched her for a while, too upset to try to comfort her, then said as though it were only now he could bring himself to say what he had to say: ‘We’re leaving here. Alan Frewen thinks he can arrange for us to have a room at the Academy.’

‘But I can’t go. I can’t leave the cat.’

‘We have to go. It’s not just the raids and the lack of sleep.
He says we must be somewhere where we can be reached by telephone.’

She sat up, jolted by the alarm that in Rumania had become a chronic condition. ‘Are things worse? What is happening?’

‘I don’t know. Nobody knows. There’s a complete ban on news.’

‘But surely there are rumours?’

‘Yes, but you can’t rely on rumours. The thing is: we have to move from here, simply as a precaution. Nothing more than that. Alan will let me know tomorrow.’

They had only clothing and books, yet in her exhausted state it seemed almost beyond her power to cope with them. She begged him: ‘Couldn’t you help me move?’

‘But, of course,’ he said, surprised by her tone. ‘Why not?’

‘You’re usually too busy.’

‘Well, I’m not busy now. The revue’s at an end and there’s hardly anyone at the School.’ He sounded exhausted, too, and spoke as though he had been defeated at last. She was about to ask him what he did with himself in Athens now but at that moment Anastea came in to take her leave and Harriet said instead: ‘I think I’ll go to bed.’

The raid went on all night. There was no respite for the men at the guns, and no rest for anyone withing hearing. By morning Harriet was quite ready to move anywhere, it did not matter where, so long as she could sleep.

Guy was seeing Alan at luncheon and said he would be back as soon as he knew what arrangement had been made for them. He got out his rucksack and began taking his books from the shelves. Anastea, who had been expecting something like this, noted what he was doing, went to the kitchen and returned with a tea-pot which Harriet had bought a couple of months before. The villa did not contain much kitchen equipment, and this was the only piece that belonged to the Pringles. Nursing it in the crook of her arm, smoothing the china with her ancient, wrinkled hand, Anastea pointed out that there had been no tea in the shops for weeks. Harriet nodded and told her to leave the pot on the table, but Anastea
clung to it, stroking it and patting it as though it were something of unusual value and beauty. She began to beg for it, pointing to the pot and pointing to her own bosom, and Harriet, surprised, said: ‘She doesn’t drink tea. She doesn’t even know how to make it. We ought to give it to someone who’ll have a use for it.’