The Balkan Trilogy (35 page)

‘It doesn’t mean they won’t come.’

Harriet, though disturbed, imagining any move to be a danger signal, understood Bella’s relief. The blow had fallen elsewhere. For Rumania there was, if not a reprieve, a stay of execution. Standing by the balcony door, Harriet could see the square and roofs pearl-white beneath the vast white misted sky. From different points miniature dark figures were converging on the newsboys like ants on specks of food. She could hear the mouse-squeaks of the boys calling a special edition. Wanting to share the situation with someone, she said to Bella: ‘Let’s meet at Mavrodaphne’s.’

‘Oh, I can’t,’ said Bella. ‘Guy has called a rehearsal. I must go. Rehearsals are such fun.’

Harriet went out and bought a paper. The invasion was announced in the stop press with a statement made by the Minister of Information to the effect that the news need rouse no apprehension in Rumanian hearts. Carol, the Great and Good, Father of Culture, Father of his People, had nearly completed the mighty Carol Line and soon Rumania would be surrounded by a wall of fire that would repel any invader.

People stood in groups about the paper-sellers talking loudly. Harriet could hear the agitated staccato of their voices as they called to one another: ‘
Alors,
ç
a a enfin commencé, la guerre
?’ ‘
Oui,
ç
a commence
.’ Her own fears renewed, she crossed the square and started to walk up the Chaussée. As she went, the sun that had been inching its way through the mist, broke out, suddenly resplendent, unrolling light like golden silk at her feet. All in a moment, the sky became cloudless and blue with the blue of summer. Piccolos were running out with poles to pull the blinds down over Dragomir’s windows. All over the fa
ç
ades of buildings striped awnings were being lowered – red and yellow, blue and white, fringed, tasselled and corded – while windows and doors were opening and people were coming out on to balconies. The balcony plants could be seen now to be swelling and spreading and growing green. Already there were little bowers of tender shoots that would, by late summer, become bedraggled tangles of coarse creepers. The cement walls, blotched and grey when the sky was grey, now gleamed like marble.

Up the Chaussée, where the women, unprepared for this sudden brilliance, were holding up handbags to shield their eyes, people were distracted from the war news. The cafés were putting chairs out in gardens and on pavements. Even as the chairs were placed in position customers were sitting down on them, beginning, without delay and with a new gaiety, the outdoor life of summer.

When Harriet reached the building that was supposed to be a museum of folk art, she saw some paintings were on show. She went inside. Rumanians did not express themselves well in paint. Indeed, there were no pictures in Bucharest worth looking at except the King’s El Grecos, nine in number, bought for a song before El Greco returned to fashion, and these were not on show to the public. The exhibitors at the salon were mediocre, imitating every genre of modern painting, but they were numerous. She was able to spend a long time looking at them. When she came out, she walked back across the square into the Calea Victoriei and, passing through
the parrot-land of the gypsy flower-sellers, reached the British Propaganda Bureau. No one was looking at the pictures of British cruisers that curled and yellowed in the sun, but there was a crowd round the German Bureau opposite. Curiosity propelled her across the road.

The window was filled with a map of Scandinavia. Arrows, three inches wide, cut from red cardboard, pointed the direction of the German attack. In the crowd no one spoke. People stood awed by the arrogant swagger of the display. Harriet, trying to look indifferent to it, made for the University building. It was now nearly luncheon time, so she might, with reason, call for Guy.

The main door of the University building lay open but there was no porter inside. Term did not begin until the end of April. The vaulted, empty passages looked bleak and smelt of beeswax and linoleum. Harriet was guided by the distant sound of Guy’s voice saying:

‘“Indeed, a tapster’s arithmetic may soon bring his particulars therein to a total.”’ Cressida, he went on to explain, was making fun of Troilus. A tapster’s arithmetic being notoriously limited, the particulars could not be very great. ‘Now again,’ he said, beginning the speech in a bantering manner.

The words were taken up and repeated in the same manner – this time by a female voice. Sophie’s voice. Harriet heard it with a pang of jealousy so acute she stopped in her tracks. She was about to retreat – but what point in retreating? Sooner or later, she had to face Sophie in this part.

She went on slowly. The door stood open at the end of the corridor. She came to it silently, expecting a crowd of players among whom she could enter unnoticed, but only Sophie, Yakimov and Guy remained.

The common-room, dark-panelled and without windows, was large and gloomy. It was lit by a central dome. The three stood under the dome. Guy had one foot on a chair and his script on his knee, the other two were performing before him. No one noticed Harriet as she took a seat by the wall.

As Sophie and Yakimov went through speech after speech,
with Guy interrupting and enforcing constant repetitions, she began to realise she could not have tolerated for long the tedium of rehearsals. She might not have required to be interrupted so often or to receive so many explanations of the words she spoke – but these interruptions and explanations were no hardship to Guy. He delighted in them. In fact he probably preferred a Cressida who would be entirely of his own making.

As for the other two … Yakimov and Sophie? She realised that what would be tedium to her was to them self-aggrandisement.

Sophie, of course, had never lacked vanity. She had the usual Rumanian face, dark-eyed, pasty and too full in the cheeks, but her manner of seating and holding herself demanded for her the deference due to a beauty. Now that her self-importance seemed justified, there was a flaunting of this demand. All the attention must be for her. When Guy gave it to Yakimov, she wanted it back again, interrupting the rehearsal every few minutes to ask: ‘
Chéri
, don’t you think here I might do this?’ or ‘Here, while he is saying this, I make like so? You agree? You agree?’ Posturing her little backside, imbuing all her moves and
moues
with a quality of sensuous and lingering caress. She seemed to be in a state of inspired, almost ecstatic, excitement about it all. She wriggled with sex.

Although she could not refrain from flirting even with Yakimov, for Guy she kept a special look, inciting and conspiratorial, which did not, Harriet noted, appear to disconcert him. He accorded Sophie now exactly the same kindly but unemotional sympathy he had accorded her when she imagined herself neglected, injured and suicidal.

While Sophie attacked direction, Yakimov responded to it. Though he appeared to have taken on size and substance, he did exactly what Guy required him to do. Harriet could imagine Guy’s satisfaction in producing from Yakimov the version of the performance he would have chosen to give himself. She could feel between the two men a warmth of mutual approval. Yakimov received the acclaim which Sophie sought, with the
result that there was in her demanding interruptions a querulousness that roused Harriet’s sympathy. She, too, was beginning to feel excluded.

Suddenly Guy picked up his script and said: ‘We’ll stop now.’

When they became aware of her, Harriet said: ‘You’ve heard they’ve invaded Norway and Denmark?’

Oh yes, everyone had heard that by now. Guy had already discounted the news. ‘It was to be expected,’ he said. ‘Once we started mining Norwegian waters, Germany had no choice but to invade.’

‘Perhaps we mined them because Germany was planning to invade.’

‘Perhaps!’ Guy did not want to discuss the subject further.

Harriet marvelled at his ability to turn his back on the news. For herself she always faced anxieties, believing that, unfaced, they would leap upon her and devour her. Perhaps Guy would not face what he was not in a position actively to combat. She should be glad, she supposed, that he had this production as a bolt-hole.

What annoyed her was that Yakimov and Sophie, to play up to him, were echoing his unconcern. They were set apart from the implications of the invasion: they were people with more important matters in mind. Harriet felt particularly irritated with Sophie, who was, she knew, as liable to panic as any other Rumanian.

Guy said: ‘We’ll go and have a drink.’ As they left the dark University hall and came out to the dazzle of day, he exclaimed: ‘Isn’t it wonderful!’

Sophie laughed shortly: ‘How ridiculous the English are about the sun! In England they hold up their faces, so …’ she goggled absurdly up at the sky, ‘and say …’ she cooed absurdly: ‘“Oh, the sun, the sun!” Here, I can tell you, we get sick of the sight of it.’

Harriet asked her how she was enjoying her part in the play. Her only answer was a shrug and a sulky down-droop of her full lips. Was it possible that, despite her advantage, she resented Harriet’s appearance on the scene? Had she imagined that,
having displaced Harriet in the part, she might displace her altogether? ‘Really!’ thought Harriet, ‘the girl is ridiculous!’

As Guy made to cross the road, Sophie paused and asked where they were going. He answered: ‘To the Doi Trandafiri.’ Fretfully, she said: ‘I don’t want to go there. It’s always so crowded.’

‘Oh well,’ said Guy. ‘We’ll see you later.’

As Sophie went off, looking angry, Harriet said: ‘If you don’t make a fuss of your poor leading lady, you’ll be losing her.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Guy spoke easily. ‘She’s enjoying herself too much.’

In the café, he said: ‘I want to hear Yakimov in a few scenes.’ They read three scenes and between each Guy bought Yakimov a
ţ
uic
ǎ
.

At the end, Yakimov asked: ‘How was I?’ and there was in the question a tremulous anxiety.

‘Splendid,’ said Guy, his approval so whole-hearted that Yakimov’s cheeks grew pink.

Gratified, Yakimov breathed: ‘Dear boy!’ and was for a moment bemused like a child becoming aware of its own qualities.

Harriet noticed a change in him, not great, but radical. Guy had roused in him a will to excel.

‘You know,’ said Guy, ‘you have the makings of a great actor.’

‘Have I?’ Yakimov’s question was modest, but not disclaiming. He fixed on Guy eyes glowing with admiring gratitude.

‘But you must learn your lines.’

‘Oh, I will, dear boy. Don’t fear,
I will
.’

As Harriet watched, it seemed to her this nebula of a man, so long inert, was starting slowly to evolve.

23

A week after the German invasion of Denmark and Norway, Inchcape displayed in the British Propaganda Bureau window a map of the Scandinavian countries with the loss of the German destroyers at Narvik restrainedly marked in blue. In time came the landings of British troops at Namsos and Andalsnes.

In the window opposite, the red arrows of Germany thrust the Norwegians back and back. One day the Allies announced an advance, another the Germans announced an Allied retreat. Merely a strategic retreat, said the British News Service. The Germans, advancing up the Gudbranstal, claimed they had joined up with their Trondheim forces. The British admitted a short withdrawal.

Every morning the passers-by, lured by these first remote moves in the war, crossed the road to compare window with window; but it was the blatant menace of the giant red arrows that held the crowd. The pro-British faction of the press predicted a British counter-attack that would finish the Germans once and for all. But even while this prediction was being made, the Germans reached Andalsnes. Four thousand Norwegians had surrendered; the politicians fled; the Allies took to the sea. It was suddenly a German victory.

The map with the red arrows disappeared. The window remained empty. No one was much impressed. The move had not, after all, been the beginning of events. It seemed a step into a cul-de-sac. The audience waited for more spectacular entertainment.

At the beginning of May, Harriet had to face her task of
dressing the players. Inchcape had written to the London office and obtained a small grant towards the production. Most of this money was required for the hire of the theatre and theatre staff. What remained could be expended on the costumes. Harriet had been envisaging some such gorgeous display as she had seen in London productions of Shakespeare. The money she had in hand would barely cover the cast in sackcloth.

She found that costumes could be hired from the theatre and went with Bella to see those made for a production of
Antony and Cleopatra
some ten years before. They had been used on every possible occasion since and were threadbare and elaborately ugly.

‘Filthy, too,’ said Bella, who had been examining them keenly. She twitched her fingers in distaste. ‘Can you see Helen in that pea-green plush?’

Feeling discouraged, like a child set a task beyond its years, Harriet, who had not wanted the task in the first place, tried to hand it back to Guy. Guy, adept at delegating work, simply laughed at her. ‘Don’t make difficulties, darling. It’s all quite simple. Don’t have armour – actors hate it, anyway. Just suggest it. Hire a few helmets, swords and so on from the theatre. Hire the cloaks, too. Put the Greeks into skirts and corselets – quite easy to make with canvas. The Trojans, being Asiatics, could wear tights – they’re the cheapest things possible.’

‘But the Rumanians would be bewildered.’

‘They’d love it. A new idea – that’s all they want.’

Having, with a few words, reduced the task to an absurdity, Guy swept off, leaving her with the sense that she had made a great deal of fuss about nothing.

Clarence offered to drive her wherever she wanted to go. One evening in early May they drove to a suburb where there was a factory that made theatrical tights. Harriet, when called for, found Clarence’s associate Steffaneski in the car. Clarence was combining the trip to the factory with some Polish business. The two passengers greeted one another rather blankly. Neither found the other easy company and each had regarded
this occasion as his own. Clarence, who had nothing to say, seemed equally displeased with both of them. It was as though the presence of each had caused a rift between himself and the other. It occurred to Harriet that Clarence was the friend of the solitary personality, and he wanted to be the only friend. He was the friend of Harriet and the friend of Steffaneski – but not of both together. Siding, as he did, with the misfits, he was troubled now by not knowing with which to side. His face was glum.