The Balkan Trilogy (36 page)

As they drove out through the long grey low-built streets that stretched towards the country, Harriet, who thought the Count the least occupied of men, broke the silence by suggesting he might take part in the play.

He turned from her in morose scorn. ‘I have not,’ he said, ‘time for such things. I do not make play while the war is fought.’

‘But you can’t fight here.’

Steffaneski, suspecting he was being teased, gave an exasperated twitch of the lips.

In this area of Bucharest the buildings were of all wood. These were not the shacks of the very poor, but roomy, well-built shops and houses like those in a Middle West shanty town. The wide, unmade road, under water in spring, was still a quagmire, with stretches of standing water reddened by the evening sun.

The car rocked and squelched, then came to a standstill. Clarence pressed the accelerator. The wheels turned in the mud but did not move forward.

‘We’re here for the night,’ said Clarence.

‘Perhaps Count Steffaneski would get out and push,’ said Harriet.

The Count stared, unhearing, from the window. Clarence, unamused by Harriet’s humour, was becoming acutely irritable, when, unexpectedly, the wheels caught and the car lunged forward.

They found the address Harriet had been given. She had hoped for a theatrical workroom, a sort of studio perhaps,
with something of the self-contained creative life she most missed in Bucharest. What she found was a large wooden hut like a garage. Inside there was a single room where a dozen peasants, some still at the level of peasant dress, were working on knitting machines. There was not even a chair to offer the customer. The light was failing. Some oil-lamps hung from the rafters and the air was heavy from a smoking wick.

A gaunt little man, wearing peasant trousers but a jacket that was part of an old morning suit, came forward, unsmiling, and raised his brows. As he stood beside Harriet, silent and expressionless, she could not tell whether or not she were conveying her needs to him. She had written down the sets of measurements in metres and, beside each, the colour required. When she finished speaking, he nodded. She could not believe he had grasped it all so quickly. When she tried to explain further, he bent, touched his ankle and drew his hand up to his waist.

‘
Da, da, precis
,’ she agreed.

He nodded again and waited for her to go.

She went, doubtfully.

‘All right?’ Clarence asked as he started the car again.

‘I don’t know.’ She could not believe that the man had grasped so rapidly what had been conveyed in very poor Rumanian.

On the way back, Clarence turned into an alleyway, a deep rift of mud, and stopped at a warehouse, another wooden hut, its doors held with a padlock. It housed the goods sent out from England for the relief of the Poles. Harriet, when she followed the men in, gazed about in wonder at the bales of linen, the sheets, blankets and pillows, the shirts and underwear, the crates of knitted garments.

‘What are you going to do with it all?’ she asked.

Clarence said: ‘That is what we have come here to decide.’

Harriet, wandering round and examining things, waited for a discussion to take place, but neither of the men said anything.

Harriet fingered a pile of shirts and suggested they could let Guy have some of them. ‘He only owns three,’ she said.

Clarence thrust out his lower lip, looking wary and important. After some reflection, he said: ‘I might
lend
him a few.’

‘Yes, do.’ Harriet began picking out the largest shirts.

‘Just a minute.’ Clarence strode over to her with an air of nervous decision, obviously afraid she would get the better of him, and said: ‘I will lend him two.’

She gave a laugh of derisive annoyance. ‘Really, Clarence, are you sure you can spare them?’ Clarence looked the more obstinate.

Steffaneski, consciously aloof from their quarrel, said: ‘Is it not to be decided what we do with this stuff?’

‘It might be sold to the Rumanian army,’ said Clarence.

The suggestion, tentative as it was, was accepted without hesitation: ‘Agreed. Now I wait in the car.’ Steffaneski strode out, leaving Harriet and Clarence to face one another, each in a state of sparking annoyance.

‘What about underwear?’ Harriet began turning over a pile of vests.

Clarence pushed her away: ‘I have to account for these things.’

‘Guy has almost no underwear.’

The more Harriet persisted, the more obstinate Clarence became; the more she felt his obstinacy, the more she persisted. At last, Clarence said: ‘I’ll lend him two vests and two pairs of pants.’

She accepted this offer defiantly, knowing he expected her to refuse.

When they left the warehouse, Clarence locked the doors ostentatiously. Harriet, smiling with anger, carried her prizes to the car, where Steffaneski, one shoulder hunched against a window, sat biting the side of his left thumb. He stared into the distance.

Returning to the city’s centre, no one had anything to say. When they reached the cross-roads and the statue of the boyar Cantacuzino, it was late twilight. The office workers were fighting their way on to the trams. In the Calea Victoriei the car was held up by the crowd round the window of the German Propaganda Bureau.

Harriet said: ‘There’s a new map in the window.’ Without speaking, Clarence stopped the car and got out. Rising tall and lean above the heads of the Rumanians, he stood for some moments and gazed into the window, then turned in a business-like way and opened the car door. ‘Well, it’s begun,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ Harriet asked.

‘Germany has invaded the Lowlands. They’ve overrun Luxembourg. They’re already inside Holland and Belgium. They claim they’re advancing rapidly.’

As he got into the car, neither Harriet nor Steffaneski spoke. Chilled with nervous excitement, she reflected that while they had been wrangling about shirts and underwear this news had been waiting like a tiger to pounce on them.

‘This comes of the folly of Belgium,’ said Steffaneski. ‘They would not permit a Maginot Line to the sea. Now’ – he struck his finger across his throat – ‘Belgium is
kaput
.’ He sounded more angry than anything else.

‘Not yet,’ said Harriet.

‘Wait. You know nothing. But I – I have seen the Germans advance.’

‘Yes, but not against British troops.’

‘Wait,’ said Steffaneski again, his face impassively grim.

Clarence hooted his way round the crowd. The windows of Inchcape’s office were dark. Clarence smiled at Harriet, reconciled to her in the exhilaration that comes when outside events take over one’s life. She smiled back.

‘This time,’ he said, ‘it’ll be a fight to a finish. Let’s go and have a drink.’

24

For Yakimov these were blissful days. Each morning his breakfast was brought into his room. He had persuaded Guy that he could ‘study’ best in bed and Guy had persuaded Harriet to let him be served there. He was awakened too early, of course. The tray was slapped down angrily by Despina, who then threw up his blind, startling him out of sleep, and slammed his door as she departed. Her attitude was a pity. He could have put her to good use, cleaning and pressing his clothes: but she was not to be won. Faithfully she reflected Harriet’s disapproval of him.

Harriet herself behaved as though unaware of his presence in the flat. He had always been nervous of her, but now, knowing that while Guy needed him, Guy would protect him, he no longer attempted to placate her. He merely avoided her.

Those mornings when Guy did not force him up for an early rehearsal, he would lie on after breakfast, dozing, a copy of
Troilus and Cressida
open on the counterpane. His room had two doors, one opening on to the hall, one on to the living-room. Through the delicious apathy of half-sleep, he could hear Despina complete her work in the room, and hear the front door close as Harriet left the flat. When both were out of the way, he would rouse himself and bath and dress in comfortable solitude.

Yakimov did not care to appear alone for meals in the flat. Understanding this, Guy, if too occupied with a rehearsal to break it, would send him out for sandwiches. When they returned for meals together, Yakimov would sit at the table silent in Guy’s shadow. The plainness of the Pringle food was
regrettable. He saw things in the shops for which he longed – a very thick, green variety of asparagus, for instance, about which he attempted a hint one day: ‘Am told it’s excellent, dear girl; and cheap at the moment. This is the season for it,’ but it did not appear. As a result of this limited diet, he was constantly hungry, not for food, but for rich food. Whenever he could borrow the money he went to a restaurant to eat alone. Dobson had refused to lend him any more, but he was able to persuade an occasional ‘thou’ out of Fitzsimon, the good-looking third secretary who was to play Troilus, and Foxy Leverett, who was cast as Hector.

Guy had forbidden Yakimov to borrow from students, but when pestered by one of them to explain his brilliance as an actor he would take the chance to whisper rapidly: ‘Wonder, dear boy, could you spare a
leu
or two?’ and seize what was offered and make off with the celerity that Bacon preferred to secrecy.

He could also make a little pocket-money when he dined out with the Pringles. Guy, who over-tipped in a manner Yakimov thought rather ill-bred, always left a heap of small coins on the table for the piccolo. Yakimov, insisting that Guy precede him from the table, would pocket all he could gather up as he passed.

Guy was absurdly careless with money. One noonday, when they were rehearsing alone, Yakimov saw him pull out with his handkerchief two thousand-
lei
notes. Retrieving, and borrowing, these unseen, Yakimov excused himself and went to
ç
ina’s, where he sat on the terrace eating the asparagus of which he had been deprived and heard the orchestra play in the elegant
chinois
stand over which the Canary creeper was breaking into flower.

What he experienced in these days was what he had experienced with Dollie, the consolations of security. When he did not know where his next meal was coming from, he was usually too driven by hunger to feel pity for himself. Now, as he lay in bed, contemplating his profound need for care and protection, a tear would often trickle down his cheek; a luxurious,
an enjoyable tear. He had found again in Guy the figure of the provider. More than that, Guy gave him, as Dollie had failed to give, the comfortable sense that he was earning his keep. And he was not only secure in the flat, he was secure in the country. The Legation was on his side. He was doing a job for British prestige. Should his
permis de séjour
be cancelled, Foxy or Fitzsimon would see that it was renewed. Above all, he had become again what he had been in the old days – a personality.

He was modest in acceptance of praise. When Foxy Leverett said: ‘You’re magnificent, dear fellow. How do you do it?’, when the large-bosomed girl students crowded round him squealing: ‘You are
so
good, Prince Yakimov; tell us how you are so good,’ he shook his head, smiling, and said: ‘I really do not know,’ that being no less than the truth.

Since the term began, the junior students had been left to Guy’s staff of English teachers; the seniors had been absorbed into the play. Only a few had speaking parts; the others, cast as soldiers and attendants, were called to all rehearsals so that they might improve their diction and their knowledge of the play. Guy frequently lectured them, elucidating its obscure passages. They formed an ever-present background to the production – and Yakimov was their hero.

His success as Pandarus surprised him less than it surprised anyone else. He had always nursed the belief that if he ever tried to exert himself the result would be remarkable. At school, where he had been the droll of the class, one of the masters had said: ‘Yakimov is such a fool, he must be a genius.’ And Dollie had often said: ‘There’s more to Yaki than you think.’

He had always supposed that success called for effort, and effort was something he particularly disliked. It was the ease of his triumph that surprised him. Guy had given him no more than a push and he had stumbled forward into achievement. He was charmed by his success, and assured. He began to believe not only in the present, but the future. Something, he was sure, would come of his performance as Pandarus. He would live off it for the rest of his life.

Had he been pressed to define what might come of it, he would have looked back no further than to the days when he had been a war correspondent. He had a hankering after the privileges and prominence of that position, and, more than anything, for an expense account that would permit him once more to revel in unlimited food and drink. Perhaps someone would invite him to become a war correspondent again!

Meanwhile, he stood unobtrusively at Guy’s elbow, accepting drinks from his admirers with murmurs of gratitude. Guy was the centre of the group. Guy did the talking. Yakimov told himself: ‘The dear boy likes the limelight’ – this observation being no more critical than that which he had once made about Dollie: ‘The dear girl likes her own way.’ He did no more than speak a warning to himself: he wanted to keep his place. For this reason, quite seriously and admiringly he spoke of Guy these days as ‘the impresario’, flattering him with the exotic importance of the appellation.

The group usually drank in the Doi Trandafiri. For some reason, Guy was not willing to go to the English Bar, which Yakimov much preferred. The only advantage he could see in the Doi Trandafiri was that the drinks were cheaper – and that was no advantage when one was not paying for them.

One day before the German ‘take-over’, having acquired a little money, he could not resist dropping into the English Bar to show himself hastily, a man much in demand elsewhere, to Hadjimoscos, Horvath and Cici Palu. The three noted his appearance with cold and narrow nods. He had just enough to buy a round of
ţ
uic
ǎ
, thus coaxing out of them a meagre show of affability. Hadjimoscos asked: ‘And where, dear Prince, have you been, away from us all this time?’