The Balkan Trilogy (34 page)

Harriet burst out laughing. She said: ‘Most of your actors have only to play themselves.’

Guy turned on her frowning. ‘Just try and keep quiet,’ he said.

His annoyance startled her into silence. Guy called the men to read in a group, himself taking the parts still uncast, and avoiding those scenes in which Cressida appeared.

Next day in the students’ common-room, Guy held a meeting of those students he proposed using in his production. While he was out, Dobson telephoned to say the Minister would permit any of his staff who wished to take part in the play.

‘He approves, then?’ Harriet said, surprised.

‘He thinks it a splendid idea,’ said Dobson. ‘Showing the flag and all that. Cocking a snook at the Boche.’

So Harriet had been wrong again. She said to Guy when he returned: ‘This is wonderful, darling,’ but he was not responsive. He was, she supposed, absorbed in his production, and the fact made her feel misgiving like a child whose mother is too occupied with the outside world. Still, she was caught in a sort of wonder at the growing reality of the play.

‘You are rather remarkable,’ she admitted. ‘You make it all seem so easy. You just ignore difficulties that would have brought me completely to a stop.’

His only reply was: ‘I’ll take Yaki with me tomorrow. We’ll have to start rehearsing seriously.’

‘And me?’

‘No.’ He was sitting on the edge of the bed tugging at his shoes, trying to get them off without undoing the laces. As he did so, he gazed out of the window with a frown of decision: ‘I think you’d be more useful doing the costumes.’

‘Do you mean instead of playing Cressida?’

‘Yes.’

She was, at first, merely bewildered: ‘But there isn’t anyone else to play Cressida.’

‘I’ve already got someone.’

‘Who?’

‘Sophie.’

‘You invited Sophie to play my part before you’d even told me?’ She was dumbfounded. This treatment seemed to her
monstrous, but she told herself she was not hurt. She did not care whether she was in the production or not. After a pause she asked: ‘Did you tell Sophie that I was to have played the part?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘But someone else might have told her.’

‘They might, of course. What does it matter?’

‘You don’t think it matters if Sophie learns she has pushed me out of the play?’

‘She hasn’t pushed you out of the play. It had nothing to do with her. It was simply obvious to me that we couldn’t work together. You would never take the production seriously.’ He started looking about for his slippers. ‘Anyway, no producer can do a proper job with his wife around.’

After she had absorbed the situation she tried to explain it away. Guy, she supposed, found her presence frustrating. She had not actually ridiculed his position – but he feared she might. She made him apprehensive. Her presence spoilt the illusion of power.

After a long interval, she said: ‘I suppose I deserve it.’

‘Deserve it? What do you mean?’

‘I made no attempt to understand Sophie, or to behave, so I brought out the best in her. I suppose I could have played up to her; shown sympathy or something. I didn’t. I was to blame. Now you are giving her an opportunity to get her own back.’

‘Darling, you are absurd!’ Though he laughed at her ideas, he was clearly disconcerted by them. ‘You can’t possibly believe that!’ He frowned down at her, his frown affectionate yet perplexed. He put a hand on her shoulder and gave her a slight shake as though seeking to shake her into a semblance of something more comprehensible. He said: ‘It was only that I had to have someone else. Sophie is suitable. You must agree. You would have done quite well, but I knew I couldn’t produce you. The relationship would have got in the way.’

She let the matter drop. It was only later when everyone
she knew was in it that she began to feel hurt at being out of the production. More than that, she was jealous that Guy should be producing Sophie in one of the chief parts of the play. Unreasonably, she told herself. She could no longer doubt that Guy had been perfectly honest about his relationship with Sophie. Innocent and foolish as he was, the idea of marriage to Sophie had been, nevertheless, attractive as an idea rather than a reality. He was not, in fact, one to make a marriage of self-sacrifice. He was a great deal more self-protected – perhaps from necessity – than most people realised. Realising it herself, she could only wonder at the complexity of the apparently simple creature she had married.

22

The spring showers washed away the last vestiges of the snow. With each reappearance the sun grew warmer. More and more people came out at evening to stroll in the streets. Up the Chaussée, where the chestnut branches were breaking with green, the chatter of the crowd could be heard above the traffic. Despite the delights of the season, it was a disgruntled chatter.

The Cabinet had inaugurated internal retrenchment in order that exports to Germany might be increased. To save petrol, taxis were forbidden to cruise in search of fares: they could be picked up only at given points – an unheard-of inconvenience. Food prices were rising. The new French silks were appearing in the shops at an absurd price. Imported goods were growing scarce and would, it was rumoured, soon disappear altogether. In panic, people were buying many things they did not want.

Guy was not much interested when Harriet described the sense of grievance in the city. His worries were elsewhere. There was, she thought, a sumptuous aloofness about his manner these days. His preoccupation was the deeply contented preoccupation of the creator: he was not to be shaken by trivialities. Even Inchcape, coming in one breakfast time – his usual time for unexpected visits – could rouse little curiosity in Guy, although he made it evident that his news was likely to please Guy less than it pleased him.

He would not sit down, but strolled about the room laughing in high delight at what he had to tell. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Well,
well
!’

The Pringles, knowing that, given encouragement, he would only procrastinate further, waited in silence to hear it.

At last he relented. ‘You’ve heard what’s happened to your friend Sheppy?’ he asked.

They shook their heads.

‘Ha!’ squawked Inchcape; then, coming to it at last: ‘He’s been arrested.’

‘No!’ said Harriet.

‘
Yes
. Down by the Danube. The ass was caught with the gelignite on him.’

‘Trying to blow up the Iron Gates?’

‘Something like that. They were caught in a river-side bar, shouting drunk, talking quite openly about bringing Danube shipping to a standstill. They imagined, because Rumania is supposed to be a British ally, the Danube bargemen would be happy to help sabotage their own livelihood. What a pack of fools! Anyway, they’re all under lock and key now. “A fair cop,” I believe the expression is.’

‘Who got caught with him? Anyone we know?’

‘No, none of the local conscripts were there; only the top brass. This was Sheppy’s first expedition – and his last.’ Inchcape slapped his thigh, crowing at the thought of it. ‘The first and last sally of Sheppy’s Fighting Force.’

Harriet smiled at Guy, but Guy might have been a thousand miles removed from the whole matter. She asked Inchcape: ‘What will become of them?’

‘Oh!’ Inchcape twisted his mouth down in his ironical smile. ‘No doubt the F.O. will get them out. They’re
much
too valuable to lose.’

Rumania did not want a diplomatic incident just then. Sheppy and his ‘henchmen’ were flown back to England. After that came official denial that he had ever existed. No saboteur, it was stated, could slip past the net spread wide by Rumania’s magnificent body of security police. But the story had got around and it added to the general sense of insecurity and victimisation. The press began to write openly
of the injustices being suffered by a peaceful nation in someone else’s war.

Harriet could now read enough in the Rumanian papers to realise how rapidly Rumania’s too distant allies were passing out of favour. No one had been reassured by Chamberlain’s declaration that ‘Hitler has missed the bus’. If it were true that England was now an impregnable fortress, then ‘
tant pis pour les autres
’ said
L’Indépendence Romaine
. The fact that Germany, without making any move, was now receiving seventy per cent of all Rumanian exports was not, said
Timpul
, any cause for self-congratulation. Germany’s demands would increase with her needs. What she was not given she would come and take.
Universul
wrote slightingly of those who used Rumania in time of peace but in war-time not only abandoned her defenceless, but sought to sabotage her resources. When, oh when, they all wanted to know, could the great, generous-hearted Rumanian people, now left to buy off the enemy as best they might, again look forward to those summers of joyous frivolity they had known before this senseless war began?

Harriet, a member of an unfavoured nation, felt shut out from Guy’s world to face the painful situation alone. With little else to do, she often dropped in at the Athénée Palace to look at the English papers. They were exceptionally dull, concerned usually with some argument about mine-laying in Norwegian waters.

The hotel was as dull as the papers. It was an inert period between seasons: a time of no news when the journalists were elsewhere. Nothing was happening in Bucharest. Nothing, it seemed, was happening anywhere in the world. And, despite all the apprehension, it was likely enough nothing would happen.

But in Bucharest, anyway, apprehension was not groundless. The political atmosphere was changing. A notice appeared under the glass of the café tables to say it was forbidden under threat of arrest to discuss politics. And arrest, it was said, might lead one to the new concentration camp being organised on the German model by Guardists trained in Dachau
and Buchenwald. People said the camp was hidden somewhere in the remote Carpathians. No one could say exactly where.

One showery morning, as she came from the hotel, Harriet was struck by the appearance of a young man sheltering beneath the lime trees that over-reached the garden wall.

The rain had stopped. The young leaves flashed their green against a sky of indigo cloud. The cloud was breaking. A gleam touched the wet tarmac. The young man, although neither beggar nor peasant, remained by the wall with nothing to do apparently but stand there. He was dressed in the city grey much worn by the middle classes, but he was unlike any middle-class Rumanian Harriet had ever seen. He was hard and thin. His was a new sort of face in this town. Looking at his hollowed cheeks, meeting his unfriendly gaze, she told herself he must be one of the Guardist youths newly returned from Germany. He looked at the moment not so much dangerous as ill-at-ease. Here he was, returned to a city grown unfamiliar to him, a destroyer, perhaps, but for the moment powerless.

After she had seen this one, she began to see others like him. They stood about the streets, their pallid, bony faces sometimes scarred like the faces of German duellists. They watched the pampered crowds with the contempt, and uncertainty, of the deprived. They were waiting as though they knew their day would come.

To Guy, Harriet said sombrely: ‘They’re a portent. The fascist infiltration.’

‘They’re probably not even Guardists,’ Guy said.

‘Then what are they?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

He was cutting down Ulysses’s speeches in his copy of
Troilus and Cressida
, giving all his mind to the job, determined not to let outside things distract him.

Harriet had been comforted a little by Clarence’s indignation when he found she was no longer in the cast. He left a rehearsal to telephone her, vehemently demanding: ‘
Harry
, what is this
little bitch doing in your part? Have you walked out of the show?’

‘No, I was put out.’

‘Why?’

‘Guy said he couldn’t work with me. He said I didn’t take him seriously.’

‘Why should you? It’s only a footling end-of-term show, anyway. If you’re not in it, I don’t want to be in it.’

Harriet reacted sharply to this. It was important to her that Guy’s project should succeed. ‘You must stay in,’ she insisted. ‘He will need everyone he can get. And it will probably be quite good.’

Clarence, who had been given the sizeable part of Ajax, did not argue about this, but grumbled: ‘It’s awful having Sophie around. She’s beginning to queen it insufferably.’ He said he had no intention of attending all the rehearsals. Between his work for Inchcape and his work with the Poles, he was much too busy.

The truth was, as Harriet knew, he did almost nothing at the Propaganda Bureau and very few Poles remained. The camps were almost empty. Of the officers who had entertained him on several wild occasions, scarcely one remained. They had all been smuggled over the frontier to join the fighting forces in France. Clarence, who had organised these escapes, had worked himself out of work. He needed distraction. He invited Harriet to have dinner with him next evening. There was in his giving and her acceptance of this invitation a certain revolt against Guy and the importance he gave to his production.

Next morning at breakfast, when Guy announced another day of rehearsals, Harriet asked: ‘Must you keep at it like a maniac?’

‘It’s the only way to get it done.’

His method revealed to her what she least expected to find in him – a neurotic intensity.

She said: ‘I’m going out to dinner with Clarence tonight.’

‘Oh, good! And now I must get Yaki up.’

‘When can we hope to get rid of that incubus?’ Harriet crossly asked.

‘I expect he’ll find a room when his remittance comes. Meanwhile, he must be fed and housed and accepted, like a child.’

‘A pretty cunning child.’

‘He’s harmless, anyway. If the world was composed of Yakimovs, there’d be no wars.’

‘There’d be no anything.’

It was the morning of the 9th of April. Guy and Yakimov had just left when the telephone rang. Lifting the receiver, Harriet heard Bella crying to her: ‘Have you heard the news?’

‘No.’

‘Germany has invaded Norway, Sweden and Denmark. I’ve just heard it on the wireless.’ Bella spoke excitedly, expecting excited response. When Harriet did not give it, she said: ‘Can’t you
see
! It means they aren’t coming here.’